


Scavenger

by typhe



Series: Snowblind [5]
Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, LHM, M/M, Recovery, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 15:50:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18552895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typhe/pseuds/typhe
Summary: As Vanyel and a foreign prince race to save a city under siege, he feels his Gifts slipping from his control.  Lonely, beset with nightmares and unable to trust his magic, Vanyel can think of only one way to save those he loves from himself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've not updated this series in years, but I never really quit it - just took a long time to bring this amalgam of hurt and comfort together. This is set about 8 or 9 months after [_Ashes To Ashes_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/586948), and deals with the aftermath of those events.
> 
> Content warnings: Van thinking about bereavement, suicide and sexual abuse: I am also gonna warn for disordered eating. Those topics are why I erred on the side of a 'Mature' rating - there's no sex here, sorry to disappoint. This is an adult fic with adult content like being overworked and tired all the time, failing at self-care, and getting stuck in awkward conversations with your coworkers.
> 
> I'm very grateful to everyone on [](https://last-herald-mage.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](https://last-herald-mage.dreamwidth.org/)**last_herald_mage** who read this fic when I first posted it in clumps early last year. I really appreciate your support & love for this ship, and I took account of all your criticisms as I edited this story into final shape. In addition to general sprucing-up, Chapters 1, 2 and 7 got a little new content, and the order of scenes in chapters 4-6 has switched around a bit.

_:Do you see them?:_

_:Not yet,:_ Vanyel replied, and he ran deeper into the undergrowth with his eyes half closed to the world around him. FarSight wasn't his strongest Gift at the best of times. Out here in the mountains, alone, under fire, it was _difficult_. He wished they hadn't split up. He wished he'd more energy for stretching his sight. _No help for it. Alone, I can hide._ The sun had slipped over the mountain and here, half buried in weeds and mulch with the rain casting a veil over the twilight, he would be hard to find again.

 _There goes another set of Whites. If it's not the dirt, it's the dust, or I'm wearing them thin scrambling up hills._ He'd not missed this rough, wild stretch of borderland. Whoever it was that had loosed a volley of arrows in his direction was still out there. His FarSight was near to useless in these woods - he scanned down gullies snaked by goat tracks, searching and dismissing every rare inhabitant, everything that breathed or moved. A wandering ibex, a child herding goats, a man heading back home with his firewood - or was he? _:Almost makes me miss hunting mages out here.:_ A mage could never hide from his OtherSight for long.

_:Really?:_

_:No,:_ Van admitted. Gods, he had felt tired enough just from the journey and from dealing with Rethwallen - if Karse really had suppressed their mages for good he'd be viciously glad. It had been ten years since he'd last fought across this high border country and his stamina was woefully less than he knew. That skirmish yesterday had left him exhausted. And here he was chasing trouble, a candlemark's hard riding from the Rethwalleni camp. _Not like I have a choice. Sooner me being a target than Prince Favinolieth._

Behind the thin cover, he dropped to his belly on the earth and tried to think. _Where are they hiding?_ Van had been close to the river when they'd loosed the arrows. He'd run uphill through the woods after they split up - if the Karsites had followed either one of them, Vanyel's hunch was that it hadn't been him. _More likely, they held their position. Why leave a good hunting spot?_

His mind worked through each fold of the mountain, each clearing. _Think. They know the Rethwallenis are marching east. If the Karsites are laying another ambush, they won't have gone far from the pass._ He cut out distractions - movements, the sound of the nightbirds - and focused only on the patterns of the land around the thin road that snaked down from the pass. 

And he saw them.

Two lookouts crouched with their bows on their backs, in a shadowed spot of hillside below the pass. His mind swept circles around them, below them, and in a thickly wooded crevice not fifty paces further from the road, he found their hideout.

He counted nearly sixty, armed with bows and spears. They camped without fires, and with their weapons close to their sides. _Set two to watch, and make the rest ready. We could have walked right into their trap in the morning, if we'd been careless._

To set such a small band against Favinolieth's company meant they weren't intending to _win_ \- only to cause as much damage as they could and then run. Mostly likely, they'd covered all the borderland roads with these nimble death bands, to slow and sap and demoralise Rethwallen's soldiers until they abandoned Valdemar to her fate, treaty or no treaty. _Every soldier Lythiaren granted me is one less to protect Rethwallen's own border. I have to prove to them that her trust in me was well placed - that they're better protected by taking the fight into Valdemar._ Diplomacy was another burden, and one he was unused to lugging about on a battlefield.

But right now, Vanyel only needed to decide what to do with the would-be hunters who had become his personal prey. _Do I want them all dead? Or would I rather some of them were alive and frightened?_

There was only one of him. He was the last in all of Valdemar. _If they have any spies inside Rethwallen, they'll know I'm the Herald who's covering Favinolieth's army. They knew it was me they were hunting._ And given Karse's turn against magic, fear might be the best weapon he had.

 _:I'm going to kill their priest,:_ he declared, and Sent the image of the red-robed figure at the group's centre. _:As for the rest - depends how fast they run. Ready?:_ He Felt assent - the plan was as merciful as they reasonably could be. _:Watch me,:_ he Sent, and rose to his feet. His energy was easier to control when it could run straight up his spine, through his fingers.

Last time he'd been here, he hadn't been so concerned about control. Only winning, only killing. It was a new problem, like the cumbersome politics. Like the dread under his skin. _No more slips. Please, let me get this right._

He _reached_ , building the spell meticulously in the air above the Karsite camp. Turning the air, scraping it dry. They'd feel a warm wind above them, nothing more. They couldn't see the bright pearl of energy. Vanyel drew a path down toward its key target.

_:Van!:_

The warning call felt like a physical thump in his ear and he dropped back to the ground, fumbling the spell as he tumbled to his knees.

Fire flashed bright down below him, and someone screamed - and screamed. Vanyel flattened himself, and he felt the slick warmth of blood run down his neck. _That...wasn't a word in my ear_ , he realised, stupidly, and clasped a hand over torn edges of cartilage.

The arrow was embedded in the earth, a couple of feet behind him. _Gods damnit. I thought I was done spilling my blood on this border._

Two inches from death. He had no room for such carelessness. He diverted a touch of energy to stem the bleeding. _I've no more to spare. Disfigurement's a small price to pay for a mistake like that._ He should never have assumed that the Karsites hadn't posted another watch away from the rest of their camp. He glanced at the angle of the arrow in the earth, and traced its path up the ridge. _:Where are they?:_ Too late for elegance or mercy. He sent a bolt of raw power along the arrow's arc. And another. He rolled behind a tree. He felt another arrow catch in its branches above him, and he brought lightning down onto the archer.

Vanyel sensed the earth repulse around the magical scorching. He scrambled down the ridge, looking back toward the road - he could still hear Karsites fleeing below him. 

_:Stay out of sight for now, Van.:_

Not a bad idea, with the survivors running off through the valley. In his haste releasing the spell, he'd killed more of them than he'd planned to. A plume of fire still swept low over their camp - that part of the spell was an illusion, but they had no way of knowing. _:Well, that could have been worse.:_ He ran a finger over his misshapen ear; it seemed to have almost stopped bleeding. _:And my Whites were already ruined.:_

_:We're alive. I'll head back up the road to meet you.:_

_:I won't be long. I don't like my lack of energy,:_ he admitted uneasily, reaching for the nearest node, near the border many miles south of them. He was in luck - it was a node he knew of old, and he checked it minutely from the outside but found no sign of tampering. He tapped it deeply, covering his focus stone with two cupped hands as he filtered the power. Something wasn't right, but it wasn't to do with the node. _:I don't like how I'm using magic at all.:_ The power didn't seem to stay in his grasp as he expected, and his reserves were thinner than they'd any right to be. That spell had barely kept under control. Taver knew what that meant just as well as he did. A mage had no margin for error. It was total control or none at all.

 _:Then come back and rest.:_ His words were infused with some worry.

 _:I will. You should try Choosing someone younger and cleverer next time. With better FarSight.:_ Taver didn't reply, and Van felt the numb edge of his sorrow, and immediately regretted his callousness. He wouldn't take kindly if a friend said something like that to him, would he? _:I'm sorry. That was awful of me.:_

Taver Sent him a burst of pure affection. _:You're forgiven.:_

 

It was pitch dark by the time they returned to Favinolieth's camp, and the nighthawks and grasshoppers sang over Taver's hoofbeats. The Rethwallenis were on high alert, and Van lit a tiny magelight above Taver's head - he could do without another volley of arrows in his face. What a sight he must be, muddy and bloodstained and bathed in clear silver light like a saint.

Favinolieth was waiting at the post with the night watch, and he raised his dark eyes in an earnest smile as Van and Taver came near. "Vanyel, it's been hours," he exclaimed.

"I smoked out another Karsite ambush squad and sent them running over the hills - I don't think they'll trouble us again tonight."

"Are you sure?"

Van shrugged, and felt pain lance down his neck. "You've read their stories about me. I'm a demon who never sleeps."

He regretted saying it immediately. He felt the soldiers draw away from him, and the prince dropped his gaze to the level of Taver's legs. Fath was so painfully polite to him, but none of the Rethwallenis were truly at ease with his Gifts. He dismissed the magelight and swung down from Taver's back, hoping he'd be less intimidating with his feet on the earth - just a dishevelled, exhausted man of no great stature, presenting himself to a prince of Rethwallen with a creak-backed bow.

"You're wounded," Fath exclaimed. _Damn._ He'd hoped it would be too dark for anyone to realise, but the prince had a habit of noticing things.

"Just an arrow graze - I got careless and their lookouts saw me," and he described the entire sortie to the prince as they walked over the meadow toward Favinolieth's tent. Fath kept looking out across the camp in concern. A well-placed troop of Karsite archers could decimate them; for the last few days, Van's role had mostly been to deny them that position, with frightening displays of magic. "I don't like how we're smoking them out one small group at a time. Where's their main force?" If Karse had found a better use for their soldiers than to challenge the eastward march of Rethwallen's troops, it must be something dangerous.

"They're spread thin," Fath mused. He ducked inside his tent, and unrolled his map, spreading it out in the pool of light shed by his lantern. Van squinted at its contours in the dim yellow light. "Could they be planning to encircle us and force us off to the north?"

"It's possible. I'll ride out south tomorrow and find out," Van offered. If the Karsites didn't delay them, Favinolieth's troops would be at the pass east of Horn in three days. All of Vanyel's diffuse worries seemed to sharpen when he thought of it. He'd ridden to Rethwallen as soon as soon as Horn had sent word that their scouts had seen Karse's holy army was massing to the south of the mountains. The first incursion had occurred before he'd crossed back into Valdemar. But between then and now lay a huge unknown. It had been weeks, with little news, and he wasn't used to travelling at the slow pace of an army. He gestured to the winding mountain roads marked along the border. "Karse has always wanted control of one of the central mountain passes - if they had it, they could overrun half of southern Valdemar before we could hold them back. They spent most of the last ten years trying their luck further east," and he jabbed his finger toward the area near the Hardorn border. "They did try Horn Valley once years ago, but they could never take the citadel. I spent most of two years based out of there." Van felt a queasy and familiar yearning for those younger days, when he and Yfandes had run swift and alone over the length of the border, and politics was left to other people. Riding across mountains and rivers, returning to the citadel for shelter and a few hours of sleep then heading out to join the fight again. "So if they're really marching toward Horn, either they're repeating an old mistake, or they're trying something new." Either way, Karse's army might have reached Horn Valley weeks ago, or more.

Vanyel's memories drew him back into the embrace of those ancient, solid curtain walls. Horn had always felt like its own little world within the mountains, a dense city wound into a tiny, bright knot of bustle and firelight. He'd found respite there, briefly and chaotically. A few more days, and he'd be safe in one of Lord Percever's guest chambers; he would breathe the odd scent of their goat tallow and the birch wood they burned for kindling. He missed the taste of their sharp cider and the stiff bread and soft cheese that the mountain folk seemed to live on year-round. And Pervecer. Percever couldn't be avoided. He wouldn't be pleased about having to entertain the Rethwallenis - discretion was not a quality that Percey had much of to spare - but Van knew he would do his duty.

 _Who am I fooling? He'll probably loathe Fath._ The prince was so sincere, and polite, and always tried to use his cleverness to cover for his inexperience. Percey could push him over with one bout of bluster.

The prince peered at him in the lanternlight, and drew a handkerchief from his sleeve, reaching for Vanyel's face so fast that he reflexively shrank away. "Vanyel - let me - I'll get it cleaned -"

"I'm fine," and Van shook his head away from the prince's unexpected kindness. He reached a finger to his ear, and it came away wet and dark. He tried to sweep his hair away from the wound, and felt it clotted against his neck. "I've something for it in my supplies," he said, and rose up to his knees. He hurriedly shifted the strap that held the pocket around his neck, but it was already sticky with blood. "Hells," he muttered. He pulled it off, rubbing at it with his fingers.

"Something important?" Fath asked.

"No," _yes_. "Just a few personal letters - from - a good friend," he added, and realised he was clumsily elaborating upon a perfectly adequate lie. He felt dizzy, though surely he'd not lost much blood. He'd kept such careful distance from Fath - from every Rethwalleni - he hadn't let them believe he had such a thing as a personal life, or anyone close to him at all.

Favinolieth nodded, a curious gleam in his eye, and Van quickly muttered his leave, barely straightening his back before creeping into the tent that the soldiers had set for him beside the prince's. Scant privacy, but at least he was alone now.

He lit a magelight no greater than a candle flame, and took a sorry stock of himself. His Whites were _very_ ruined. His shirt was coated with grass stains and blood; the jerkin and breeches might be salvageable, but hardly passed for Heraldic in their current state. He unpacked his medical kit - he wished he'd brought a handmirror. His left cuff was cleaner than the right; he doused it in medicinal brandy and scrubbed at the wound on his ear, feeling its edges. It was worse than he'd first thought - he hadn't realised the arrow had grazed his scalp as well as splitting his ear in two. So easy to miss the depth of a wound through the initial shock.

 _Gods, I want a bath. In Horn, I can have a bath._ He shivered, as if such warmth were impossibly far away amid the dark, cold night. It hadn't felt cold earlier. He slipped half out of the ruined shirt, and did the best he could to scrape the dirt and dried blood off his face and neck. _Physically, that's as good as I can get. Magically...?_

He reached again for the node to the south. He somehow felt _more_ drained now than he had right after the battle. Sleep would help him back to rights. He hoped. He would make an ugly sight in the morning, riding next to Prince Favinolieth in the vanguard as they travelled east. Fath, glorious in Rethwallen's commanders' armour with a thin coronet nestled in his hair, his beard somehow still kept in a perfectly neat trim after weeks on the road, and Van beside him, misshapen in filthy Whites. He felt more comfortable as their outrider, circling the army at Taver's ground-eating pace and not having to handle Fath's curious attention. _What a frightful mess of ogre I am to them, even if they don't know I'm a pervert._

But there was something about the situation that defied all sense, and whenever Van thought much on Favinolieth, he felt like he was chasing the tail of his own suppositions. _He's young, and clever, and he's has the troops' loyalty. And Queen Lythiaren couldn't have sent him to Valdemar if he hadn't wanted to go._ Favinolieth was no child - he was maybe a few years older than Stefen, and like Stef, his formal education put Vanyel's to shame. He spoke Valdemaran well, and was versed in every school of tactics except the one Vanyel had hodgepodged together out of hard battlefield experience. On the days when they rode together, Fath always wanted to talk either about Van's previous battles against Karse, or about some Valdemaran tale he'd read. They got along well enough, but didn't really _know_ each other, which was how Vanyel liked it. Although. For a royal scion and a highly skilled soldier, Fath was oddly deferential to him. _I'm a foreigner leaning on him for a favour; he should at best be begrudging me..._

Van reached out for Taver, and felt his presence near the eastern watchpost, lying in a patch of long grass. _:What do you think of him at this point?:_ He threaded his own hunches into the question.

:I couldn't say. I don't read humans the way you can.:

Van tried to hide his frustration. Taver was notably more obtuse about humans that than Yfandes had ever been. Strange, given how _many_ he'd bonded with. _I guess when you're unknowably old and wise, you have to draw the line somewhere._ He'd had the autumn and winter in Haven to get used to Taver's habits of mind; at first it had hurt, reaching for a voice he was used to and hearing another instead, no less loving, but love all confused and unfamiliar. 

It had taken him months to really feel comfortable in the new bond, and Taver had been so patient even when Van had been cold or lost. He hated thinking about loss - once he started, he couldn't stop. He had remained listless, like he was picking at his wounds in his own shadow, until Sovvan, when they'd talked about it all over again. That was when he'd truly realised Taver trusted him, and had forgiven him for how he'd lost Yfandes even if he couldn't forgive himself. He'd slept in Taver's stall that night, and they'd talked about Shavri as the sun set. _I never gain anything without losing everything._

Vanyel Sent his Companion an affectionate goodnight, but his question still lingered unanswered. _Why_ had Lythiaren had sent _Favinolieth_? He was talented, for sure, but she could have chosen one of her other siblings, two of whom had fought in previous border conflicts. Instead, she'd sent off a bright young man with no real experience of warfare.

 _I only wish we were headed to Haven so I could set Stef on him. If I left them together for an evening, Stef would come to me at midnight with all of Fath's secrets wrapped up in his handkerchief._ Stef's skills far outstripped Vanyel's on that front - he was so utterly approachable and charming and easy to trust, much the better liar, and very deft when the needs of Valdemar called him to lean on someone's disposition. Stef kept getting better at that, even without music - they'd been experimenting with it before he'd left Haven, sharing power, Van feeling Stef's subtle currents steering his mind. He'd tried to resist as Stef drove him to dance, his feet turning on their fireside rug like a puppet or a madman.

He brushed aside any thoughts of their other occasional evening pastimes. Occasional indeed. It had been too long ago, and even when they had last been together, Van had scattered gritty shards of broken promises between their sheets.

He crawled into his bedroll and extinguished his little light. In the shelter of night, he lapsed into that confused patter of thoughts that orbited him whenever he was falling asleep in a strange place. Missing the feel of 'Lendel's arms around him. Wanting Stef's hands against his skin. Being desperately glad that no one had to deal with him at all, because he was tired and difficult and alone, couldn't even share a tent without fearing he'd awaken as a murderer. But he wanted 'Lendel's strength so much. He wanted Stef's voice to soothe him to sleep. His torn ear felt hot and angry - he turned to his other side. He couldn't get comfortable - why was he trying? He'd not slept easy since that night he'd awoken beside Stef with a lethal spell snapping in his hands.

 _I give up. I need to Gate to K'Treva Vale when I've time to fix this, and I'll never have time. Not since Taver Chose me as Monarchs' Own. Not since Karse turned hostile again._ But those were hardly the only times he put something else first, were they? _I tried_ , he thought desperately. _But there was always something more important than my capacity to have a love life. And I told Stef not to let my burdens weigh him down, and he doesn't listen. But I tried. I tried._

 

They'd had a plan, but a daunting one; the day before Treven's coronation, Randale would be buried, and Shavri as well. Then after the coronation, Van would have to build a Gate, which was something he hadn't done since he'd bonded to Stefen, so Stef couldn't know _how_ hard it would be or how it might affect either of them. Van had kept his emotions in check all through Randale's memorial in Haven's high temple, but his fear and loss overcame him at the quiet funeral at the Grove chapel where Shavri was laid to rest. Stef's presence at his side had been all that held Vanyel together - a hand linked with his under his cloak, a silent murmur of stability. But he had to go on, to face the night and the morning and see Treven crowned and then face the agony of building a Gate.

He'd held Jisa and then left the chapel with tears drying on his cheeks. A group of Companions had assembled around the belltower to pay their own respects, silent and solemn, painted gold by evening. His grief and his guilt had drawn him to approach them, and he'd thought the least he could do was offer his condolences to Taver. It was the first time the Monarch's Own Companion had been seen in a week.

Van still shivered to think of the moment when Taver turned those blue granite eyes on him.

For the following three candlemarks he'd tried to convince Taver that he was making a grave mistake. They spoke - if it could be called that, an often wordless tangle of memory and certainties and grief - until long after night fell and everyone had left them in the dark except for Stef, who curled upon a tree root nearby to watch what passed between them. Van found him there after, smiling and damp-eyed and already forgiving him for their dashed plans.

In that first moment, Van had wanted so badly to simply accept, to embrace all that Taver was offering him, love and purpose and some small measure of absolution, but he _couldn't_ bond with him only for selfish personal reasons. He knew what it would mean to be Monarch's Own and it wasn't something he could do just to feel better about the past. But nor could he _refuse_ for solely personal reasons either, especially not ones that Taver, an avatar of all Van had ever held meaningful, assured him, mind-to-mind, were groundless. _That's what it came down to. You say I'm not cursed. You don't think I destroy every good thing that touches me. You have lost more than I will ever know. You have mourned like me, and you promise that we can live on._


	2. Chapter 2

A hawk circled above the mountain, scanning for movements in the dry shrubland below. Taver picked his way through the wild heather and hawthorn, and Vanyel looked up and imagined himself with that viewpoint, spying his prey from aloft, like a Tayledras scout with his bondbird. But it wouldn't be so simple; the bird was a stranger to him.

Van had ridden across the wide valley ahead of the Rethwalleni troops, then turned south up the ridge. They were near the formal border with Karse, somewhere in the mountains above them. No real road came close to this stretch of the border - the nearest trading post was at Haravale, and it would have been difficult for anything larger than a goat to come up this particular slope. But Taver had climbed tenaciously, ignoring Vanyel's suggestion that he dismount and carry on alone. He stared out over the valley, watching the thin river wind its way past copses of ash and golden aspen. If he waited long enough, Rethwallen's army would come marching from the west.

The silence at this height was eerie. The trees had thinned, and trouble seemed too far away. He hadn't seen any lurking ambushers today - only a few crofters, a herd of deer, a regular Guard patrol that had saluted his colours, from too far below to know who he was.

 _:Should we stop a moment?:_ he asked, and Taver sighed gratefully. As Vanyel dismounted, the Companion bent his head to snuffle at the ground; Van spied a few wildflowers hiding between the heather shrubs, bright dandelions and proud mayflowers that shook in the biting breeze. Taver didn't age, but he certainly ate. It was no verdant meadow, but it was a good place to pause and breathe in the thin air. The breeze whipped at his hair, and Van reached in his pocket for a length of leather string to tie it back. _Never mind my ugly ear. No one's here to see it except the hawk - maybe she'll take me for carrion._

He was glad to be out in open country, glad of the empty quiet. It helped soothe that inexplicable feeling of walls closing in on him.

 _I've hardly spent an hour between walls since we crossed the border. But I've been surrounded by strangers, who I mostly don't understand without resorting to receptive Empathy and_ then _all I feel is how much I put them on edge. It's worse knowing they'd quite literally castrate me if they knew anything about who I really am._ That silent, indifferent hatred seemed to encircle the Rethwallenis like an invisible wall of spears. It was like being a child again, except without even the fear of being different; when he dared to feel like himself, he seemed impossible and unspeakable among them. He could be bleeding out beside them, and they'd never see how they were causing it. _I'd like to avoid them all and not think about it again - but it's so hard. There's so much riding on this alliance and I can't just brush off Fath and all his generals and not treat them like humans, no matter what they think of me. I don't_ want _to brush off Fath._

He always sensed that hidden boundary within Favinolieth, a knife-cut line beyond which Vanyel could assume nothing.

_:Maybe you're just lonely.:_

Van ran a hand through Taver's mane thoughtfully. A tiny yellow butterfly settled in the shelter of one of the stallion's ears, beating its wings for a moment before Taver flicked it aside. _:That's an odd thing to say while I'm out chasing solitude.:_

 _:No it isn't.:_ Van Felt Taver's affection, and his concern. _:I know you miss him, Van.:_

Van's insides turned at the thought, and he felt oddly lightheaded. _:True enough. Like I'm missing a limb.:_ Discomfiting phantom sensations he didn't know how to make sense of. He never hid his feelings from Taver, though he rarely had the strength to explain them. 

He could at least admit the doubled truth to himself. _I miss_ both _of them. I never knew I could feel this way._ And he knew there was some ontological difference between being in the middle of nowhere and desperately missing 'Lendel and being in the middle of nowhere and desperately missing Stef, but from day to day he wasn't quite sure what it was. Bitter partings he tried not to think of, buried in longing.

The first courier to intercept them after Vanyel had crossed back into Valdemar had carried no fewer than four letters from Stef, written at various dates throughout the early spring. The first had seemed ambivalent and almost sullen, full of colourful detail about a recital Van had promised to attend; it had filled Vanyel with guilt, and there were only so many times he could reread the other three without going mad. There had been nothing since. He was losing time, no longer sure when he'd last seen Stef or touched him, and less idea of when he might next. He ought to write back, but what would he even say?

He reached into his shirt and pulled out the pocket that he wore around his neck - not quite over his heart, but close enough. He slipped his hand inside, and withdrew a folded letter as gently as he could; the parchment was wearing thin, ink smudged and fading beneath his fingers, and the wind seemed determined to tear it from his grasp. He held it tight by the broken edges of the seal, as if it were a proclamation. It was the one with the most recent date, and was also the shortest and quite the strangest.

_Dear Vanyel,_

_Still it seems but little time since you left Haven. The flowers are out in the Queen's Garden, which makes me think of the warm evenings last summer when I walked there with my beloved, though Valdemar had no Queen then._

_Forgive my brevity tonight - I spent all day with the Healers, and now I write this in the last of the light at my window, as the night birds begin their seasonal song and dance outside. I left them the last of my bread on the sill, because it pleases them and I like to see them happy. They know little of our troubles._

_I will trust others to relate those in better depth; it seems every messenger only spreads more panic and sends another hundred would-be heroes charging south. I have no such pretentions, but as the role I have taken is to move those of good heart to act without fear, I must ask that of myself too. And though you know I've no envy for your position, you remain my inspiration to do what I can for Valdemar. My powers are little compared to yours, but I can only hope that my endeavours may amount to something._

_By my hand, which is but all the seal I have, and yours ever in friendship,  
-S_

Vanyel folded the parchment as delicately as he'd opened it, resting his thumb in the whorled hollow of the broken seal, as if to touch his lover's eloquent hand. A none too subtle letter - since Vanyel had mentioned that aspect of Tayledras culture, Stef had rarely sent him a letter that did not, however implausibly, mention a flower or a bird or both. Friendship, indeed. But that last paragraph seemed quite out of Stef's usual character. Stef's flights of inspiration were generally more avant-garde than patriotic.

He found Taver looking over his shoulder. "Were you reading that?"

 _:I'm not even sure how you can make sense of his scrawl,:_ Taver snorted, and Van's eyes narrowed. It was true that Stef's writing was not as neat as his own, but he had a much finer turn of phrase. _:Why, is it very obscene?:_

 _:Not likely. Stef would hardly bet the kingdom on the Rethwallenis not reading my letters,:_ he pointed out. _You know, those people I came up here to get away from, because of that thing they'd hate me for which I came up here to not think about. :It's nothing that matters,:_ he concluded. Afloat on uncertainties, perhaps his thoughts tended to fix to his lifebond like an anchor. When he was in Haven, that had helped his mood rather than disturbed it. _:It's just that we're riding in the dark here - if I'd heard directly from_ anyone _, I'd feel better -:_

He felt the thin, distant contact as if his own frantic thoughts had summoned it to him, which perhaps they had. _:Vanyel?:_

He gasped aloud. _:What are_ you _doing out here?:_

 _:Looking for you,:_ Tantras replied. Van traced the Mindspeech thread, feeling out where Tantras was. Leagues away, and Van felt the presence of another Herald and two Companions close to him. _:It might be a long time since we did courier runs, but Delian's still one of the fastest in the herd.:_ He heard everything Tantras wasn't saying. _We're both too old for this._ Vanyel was present as an envoy and as a weapon, but he pictured Tantras charging south from Haven just as Stef's letter had said - there were so few others left alive who their monarchs could have sent into this situation who could wield such authority. _:What did Lytharien give you?:_

_:A full battalion of spearmen, led by one of her own brothers. You?:_

_:I'm with a division of infantry. There's more moving south. You're not a moment too late,:_ Tran continued. _:Karse breached the border not long after you reached Rethwallen.:_

_:That's what the courier told me - but not precisely where.:_

_:South and a little east of Horn - they've taken control of the pass at the neck of Horn Valley. No word from the citadel.:_ That was bad - very bad. In the past, Karse had focused their aggression further east, where the land was more forgiving. _:Horn's been effectively under blockade for three months - first they were just raiding caravans, and we sent a light infantry squad as an escort to protect our supply lines, but the Karsites came en masse and drove them off. Their captain and a few of her Guard troops survived to tell us the tale, but the rest are either dead or trapped in the city.:_

Out of all the scenarios Vanyel might have imagined, this was one of the worst. Horn was but a small citadel high in the mountains, but it was the only refuge for leagues. No one could say they ruled the mountains without control of Horn. Valdemar's border reach had long depended on it. _:Three months?:_ Gods, but it was easy to forget how much time he'd wasted in Rethwallen. Events had moved so fast it hadn't felt like so long.

_:Yes - worse, the blockade began at the end of winter. They can't have had much left in the pantry to begin with. If they're still holding out, I'm amazed.:_

_:I won't count them out.:_ Horn had been built for survival. Built by mages, he was quite sure - sited on a low hill at the centre of a valley, solid and defensible and with some unnaturally deep wells. The citadel's outer walls alone were ten feet thick. _:I'd trust Lord Percever not to give up the citadel while he still breathed,:_ Van added, and Sent a carefully curated image of the Percey that he'd known, more than fifteen years ago - a sturdy, brash man who loved his people, his city, his country, and every simple pleasure that mountain life offered. Van exised any reference to Percey's other pleasures. _Well, I learned a lot from him, most of which came down to 'never again'. :What does Karse want? Have they made any ransom demands?:_

_:None worth discussing.:_

Tran drew such a firm line under that thought that Vanyel decided to not to press him until they could speak in person. Wordlessly, he Sent his position and Favinolieth's trajectory, and an image of the hawk diving from the sky above him. He felt its dim animal frustration as it came up without a kill.

_:If we make a good pace and you don't mind veering north a little, we could intercept you by tomorrow night in Haravale. I remember there's a good inn at Haravale.:_

Van exhaled slowly. He could get through two more days of this knowing there was a friend waiting for him with a mug of ale at the end of it. _:Good. Is there a Healer with you?:_

_:Yes - Roal and three of her journeymen.:_

_:Thank the gods - I'm not hurt. Not very hurt,:_ he clarified quickly. He'd prefer not to have a scarred mess of an ear, and he might ask her about his troubles with his energy. Roal had nursed him through backlash a couple of times during the last war, and she knew a thing or two about Gift channels. She was no Moondance k'Treva, but few of Valdemar's Healers had any of that sort of knowledge at all, so she might at least be able to tell if something was really wrong. _:And who's your partner? I don't think I know him.:_

_:Herald Torrell. Masha's chosen. I'll have to introduce you later - Fetching's his real Gift - he has Mindspeech but it doesn't stretch more than a few miles. You'll love him. He idolises you.:_

Van swore at him.

 

It was just past sunset on the second day when they rounded the hill above Haravale. The Valdemaran troops were already camped below, a scattering of blue and glinting silver in the meadow outside the village, with two Heralds mounted on their Companions as they grazed. _Thank the gods. Now we better get settled while there's still some ale left._

There was no keep in Haravale, just a trodden-dirt market square, pocked with spring weeds and ringed with buildings in that familiar local style of whitewashed walls, square windows and pitched terracotta rooves. The inn was at least twice the size of the chapel that faced it in judgement from across the square; judging from the signs hanging above each door, Haravale also had a blacksmith and farrier, a weaver, a herbalist. Except for the smith and the innkeeper, all had closed their shutters and gone. Taver strode through grass grown overlong from lack of grazing. _It's easy to see what happened. People headed north when they heard the Karsites were coming, and they drove every pig and ploughbeast with them. It'll be a poor harvest come summer._ Even the thought of it made him feel sore with hunger. _How much more war can this land bear?_

It was such a relief to see Tran again, graceful atop Delian's back - he'd become all the more majestic and authoritative with age. _Tran would not thank me if I told him that. But it's the truth._ Vanyel had once accused his friend of letting Haven make him soft - but if it had, he didn't let it show. They shared an amicable mental greeting while Rethwallen's buglers sounded their salute to the Valdemaran troops, and he rode beside Favinolieth to the front of the lines.

"Herald Tantras," he said, and Taver stepped close to Delian as Van extended his arms; the touch of Tran's hands was almost jarring, a warmth he didn't remember what to do with, as if he'd forgotten that there was anyone in the world who knew him well or would reach for him as a friend. "And Herald Torrell," he continued. "I must introduce you to His Highness Favinolieth, Prince of Ranessevretirien and Commander of the Spears of the East." He glanced back at Fath, hoping he'd said that awful mouthful correctly, and found the prince staring at him as if he had made some great jest. It was so long since they'd last been that formal between themselves.

"Call me Fath," said the prince immediately.

"Then greetings, Fath." Tran bowed as gracefully in the saddle as one could, and the young man whose Companion lingered a pace behind Delian quickly mimicked the gesture. Vanyel tried to observe Torrall from the corner of his eye; a lanky figure with a throw of dark curls tied behind his neck. Van didn't recognise him at all, and he looked younger than Stef - couldn't have had his Whites for more than a year or so. "I trust Herald-Mage Vanyel has impressed our gratitude upon you? It's at such dangerous times that true friends become known." Tantras had a surprising knack for flowery language. "Tomorrow, we must plan our march to Horn, but tonight I would have you sup with us as a friend." _Very smooth._ Van could already see that Tantras had the hospitality well in hand; he had a rare knack with publicans, and it helped that he could promise the aged lady who kept the inn almost anything in return for emptying her cellars - literally - he saw Guardsmen hauling barrels out in pairs. They'd built a great bonfire of old deadfall in the square, as yet unlit; Tantras had a good sense of the moment. "Let your men make camp, and then we'll light the fires."

 

As Van brushed Taver down, he had tried to find some comfort in the warmth and the camaraderie of the two allied armies around him, but the ghostly feel of the village seemed to cut all the closer. _We're wringing the town dry. Then likely the last of the folk will go, and they'll never return, unless we can push Karse out hard and soon._ He wasn't in much mood for company - he would have preferred to spend the night quietly drinking with Tantras, or alone - but his inclinations were hardly of import.

Close to the old red-rooved tavern, Tantras had commandeered a trestle table and a few rickety benches for them to dine with Fath and his captains. Torrall was set to jump up to his feet as Van approached. _:Now's not the time to break protocol. We're equals,:_ he told the young Herald firmly, and slid into the place beside him, at the end of a bench.

 _:Thank you,:_ Torrall replied, his mind held so stiffly that Van could feel all the fearful fluttering nonsense he held back.

He greeted Tantras and Fath, who sat together at the center of the table, seemingly becoming fast friends. The innkeeper had produced her finest silver for the occasion; the Rethwalleni quartermaster had treated Vanyel better than he should, but it was some time since Van had last seen a fork with metal tines. He'd grown used to finishing his patrols late at night then eating whatever they'd saved for him, sat on the earth wherever they had camped. The trencher of bread and roasted meat in front of him smelt so rich that he felt slightly nauseous. Probably an ibex. He would have preferred something a little less bloody.

He passed Torrall a wooden cup he'd retrieved from his packs. "I would appreciate a drink, though," and Torrall graciously served him from a pitcher that Tantras had placed tactically close to his elbow. "Thank you," he murmured, and drank half his cup immediately. The sour tasting ale lingered on his tongue.

There was a dangerous lull in the conversation to the left of him. He was adrift, with little energy for friendliness and no instinct for how to fill a silence.

Torrall had no such difficulty. "You speak very good Valdemaran," he said to Favinolieth, while Van tried not to choke into his cup at the impoliteness.

"I enjoy your stories and songs," Fath replied, with a wry glance at Vanyel. "I had a tutor who piqued my interest in Valdemaran literature when I was a boy. So full of colourful characters."

Vanyel could feel his face reddening, and hoped it was merely the drink. "Rethwallen has many a hero too," he said, with a diplomatic hope that Fath wouldn't expect him to name many of them. That one summer of Collegium lessons welled up inside him, when he'd got behind on his History and had never caught up. _I was too polite to ask where his interest in us began - I just took him for an educated gentleman. It never struck me just how strange it is that he knows so much of us - much more than I've learned of Rethwallen even after nearly a decade working alongside Randale at Court. Do I have_ two _younglings here fawning after someone I'm not?_ He downed the rest of the cup, just in case.

"Aye, but I thought there was something more sincere in yours." Fath smiled. "Not just strong or clever people, but good ones." That sidelong glance at Van again. "But I was quite a lonely child then, and I was captivated by the thought of these heroes far away. I was the black sheep - ask my sister sometime." Van nodded mutely. He would not dream of being that familiar with Lythiaren.

"Vanyel, Tantras said you play music?" Torrall asked.

He tried not to flinch from the other youngster's curiosity. "When I've time," he replied, trying not to sound bitter. How long since he last played? Some handful of days before he'd left Haven. A song for his lover after dinner one cold night; candlelight flickering on an open page. His chilled fingers against his lutestrings. Stef close to the fire, eating honey-cake, his eyes so warm, so warm. _I miss music so much. I miss being home._

"We heard new songs from Haven back at the inn at Torch Cross," Torrall said. "A couple of roads-minstrels had come south to play the last season's ballads. Bit funny, hearing the winter-songs so late in the spring." It wouldn't be long til midsummer, and the midday heat was already creeping past bearable. _I want to be home before the end of summer. While there's still a flower or two out in the gardens._ He doubted it would happen.

"I would have liked to hear that," he replied.

"It was quite a show," Torrall grinned. "New songs from Bard Laynor and Bard Stefen, who all say are the best in Haven -" Now Van couldn't hide his interest. His _jealousy_ , pulling tight at his ribs. _I spent weeks scrabbling for resources in Rethwallen while Herald Torrall heard his new songs. Before I did._ Torrall continued his story obliviously. "And the two minstrels argued among each other on which was greatest - one saying Laynor, the other Stefen, and taking it in turns to play this or that - I am quite sure it was an act to win coin from the crowd - but as a musician yourself, who would you judge as the finer?"

Tantras let out a laugh, and Torrall turned to him in consternation. "He means I've a dog in that fight," Van explained, before he could take offense. _:You're tipsy,:_ he accused in a Mindspeech hiss.

 _:So are you,:_ Tran replied with a wink.

 _:Am not.:_ The moment he said it they both knew it for a lie.

"Ah - yes - I forgot Laynor wrote _The Vanquishing of Night._ Of course you must favour him."

"Oh, gods no," Van said, more harshly than he should. "You'll understand when they start writing songs about you." He was flustered enough to resort to flattery. "Actually, Tantras meant that Bard Stefen and I are good friends. I'd have trouble judging any balladeer to be his better."

Torrall's face creased. "Oh. Wouldn't have guessed he was to your taste." Van sighed under his breath. Stef might be barely older, but his pretensions were much more convincing. "Bard Stefen sings of - soft things."

"With the lives we lead, I can appreciate lovesongs much more easily than I can some dressed-up tale of great deeds and noble deaths." Chew on that. 

Torrall looked confounded, and Van allowed himself a moment's satisfaction. "But what of, uh, his reputation?"

"His reputation for what?" Van asked with cruel innocence.

The air between them chilled. Torrall fidgeted at his sleeves. "Well, uh," and much as Vanyel would love to know how he'd explain such a comment to the Monarchs' Own Herald - that notorious immaculate who never whored and never gossiped - he daren't find out. _:Tantras, tell him to shut up immediately, before the Rethwallenis realise what he means.:_

Vanyel let a moment pass in silence as he watched Torrall's face change, and then he continued lightly, "I first met Bard Stefen at Randale's court, more than two years ago. He was assigned there due to his unique Gift for singing pain away, but I found he had many other talents." Tantras, mercifully, kept his face straight this time. "Stefen turned out to be a good complement to me at Court, and as we came to know each other better, our differences only made us better friends." _I could have said it under Truth Spell._ Gods, he missed their complementary appetites.

"You know the theory that the Gifts appear in Valdemar at the time when they're needed? I think it goes for Bards as well," said Tantras. "I'd say we've a use for epics and for lovesongs both right now."

 _:Thank you,:_ he told Tantras sincerely, and he tried to lean back into the shadows, sipping the dregs of his ale and hoping no one would look at his face too closely. Torrall didn't reply to Tran - he looked chastened - and Tran asked Favinolieth some question about Rethwallen's best known epic song. _:Very diplomatic. Never mind that Laynor can't hold a candle to Stef.:_

 _:You proud mother duck,:_ Tran teased him, nodding his head sagely at whatever Fath was saying. _:Well, the youngster's red between the ears now. What's so special about the Rethwallenis, anyway?:_

 _:Don't you know what they do to people like me?:_ It wasn't until Tantras recoiled from his anger that Van realised he _didn't_ know. Hells, why _would_ Tantras know that? Why would he _care_? _:It's illegal to be shaych in Rethwallen. Punishable by means I won't describe to you.:_

Tran's eyes widened. _:But you keep going there.:_

 _:I have to,:_ and he felt maddened by months of dealing with them, goading on assumptions and pretenses and doing his damnedest to never mention the one thing that ever made him happy. And yes, he was furious that Torrall would disparage Stef for having more openness than Van could allow of himself. They lived so differently together, opposites that couldn't do without each other. _I need him. Gods, I need to recite him that conversation word for word so he can make a joke of it and not let it make me sick with anger._

 _:I'm sorry, Van.:_ He waved off Tran's apology with irritation. _:Torrall's not a bad sort and he's not a fool. I'll have a word with him about his prejudices later -:_

 _:Don't.:_ The thought was so sharp that Tantras's mind bent from his, and the connection between them flickered out. Damnit.

Tran reached out to him again, as steadily as if it hadn't happened. _:I understand if you don't want the trouble. But you know I'll always make trouble for you if you do want trouble? I owe you that much.:_

Van looked aside, feeling fractious and unable to explain why. Tantras was a good friend, and Van knew he meant it, but... 

For years now, Van had felt jumpy around everyone except Heralds and family - well, since that previous winter he'd felt jumpy around everyone but Stef. It was months since he'd left Haven, and it was impossible to even convey to Tantras how very much he didn't want to deal with any of this, or anyone. _:I want to go home.:_

He didn't know he'd Sent that til it escaped him. His hand slipped to his mouth in embarrassment. It was too easy to say more than you meant to, mind-to-mind - _but I've always had more control than that,_ and he wilted under Tantras's sympathetic expression. _:Go get some rest, Van. We'll talk about Horn in the morning - I'll keep the prince occupied.:_

Van gave into the offer, and he muttered a few words aloud about finding the privy while Tantras leaned closer to Fath, following up on some point he surely didn't care about at all. Van tried to Send some expression of his pitiful gratitude. 

_:Just go. You haven't been sleeping enough, I can tell.:_

If Tran had seen his nightmares, that wouldn't surprise him.

 

He knew exactly where he'd find Roal; still working. An army kept a Healer busy. He found her watching as one of the journeymen tended to a man's bruised foot, but she immediately straightened and favoured Vanyel with her full attention. "There you are." Ten years had barely changed her. Roal was a thin staff of a woman, wrapped with iron. "Tantras warned me you wanted to see me."

"I'm barely scratched -"

"If you're asking at all, I know you need it," she replied. "And you look worn down enough."

"Just old," he complained.

Roal snorted in derision. "Don't give me that." He was unsure of her age - rather older than him, to be sure, but Healers tended to age well. _Most Healers_ , and his heart bruised with a thought of Shavri in her last weeks of life.

He swept his hair to the side to reveal the damage. "Kiss from a Karsite archer," he explained.

Roal's eyes widened, and she gingerly touched his torn ear. "It's not as bad as it looks," she informed him. "But it's a mess. Sit on the earth with me a moment - I'd better clean it before I fix it up," and she pulled a flask from her bag and uncorked it. Vanyel smelt ether, and he gritted his teeth at the cold, stinging pain as she tended the wound. _All for my vanity. The healing is worse than the injury was._

And he'd grown soft, when it came to pain. He recalled another mistake over winter - he'd been working on some of his Border traps and had overextended himself into backlash, then spent the whole afternoon in bed atop a mound of pillows, while Stef played an entire song cycle to him until the pain had passed. Vanyel had protested, but Stef had sworn it was effortless - and truly, it hadn't seemed to drain him much. Between a lifebonded pair, there could be more joy than effort in moving energy, and Stef didn't even need to enter a trance to exert his strange power upon Vanyel's pain. _It was more like a reflex - just as he reflexively soothes his own hurts._ The number of times Stef had played his fingers raw without noticing...

That image of Stef's hand, curled and bleeding, lingered with him as Roal finished her work, and he felt shaken with loneliness and awe and yearning and other feelings he didn't have space for. _That's who he is. He doesn't hurt, doesn't rest, doesn't give up. And he cares for me, for some damnedfool reason._ He was so exhausted, and thinking of Stef's boundless energy was like trying to stare at a bright mage-light in a darkened room - he couldn't bear it.

Roal set down her flask, and held his ear with both her hands, delicately aligning the torn flesh. Vanyel felt her energy drawing the wounded edges back together, urging them to be whole again. For such a superficial wound, it didn't take long. "There. Back in one piece," she said. "No other road wounds?"

_I meant to ask her -_

But why? If he told her he hadn't the energy he was used to, or the control to hold a spell or keep a thought quiet, most likely she'd only tell him to sleep more, and he hadn't time. But Van felt an odd guilt as he held his tongue. _The person I really need to talk to is Starwind. And I'll never have time to reach him. So until I do, there's no point me asking anyone else about my magic. There's only one solution and no one else would know it._ Whenever it occurred to him, the thought of that journey to k'Treva Vale taunted him, oddly like his old ice-dream; a distant destination in his future. But it wasn't a frightening vision, it was a gloomy intention. He had known for months, and hadn't dared explain it to Taver, or to Stef. But he could not see a world beyond it.

"No, I'm fine," he replied.

 

Vanyel looked up at the starry sky and breathed deeply and slowly, tasting a chill at the back of his throat in the summer-warm air. He walked slowly across the meadow, the seedheads of the long grass brushing at his legs. There were soldiers to every side of him, raucous in groups or already sleeping off their ale. There was a clear gap between the two camps, but in the dark they felt little different to Van; full of strangers, lives he had to take care for and use as best he could.

He gingerly felt at a magical node nearby, glowing under the hill oblivious to all the ruckus, and he hungrily thought of drawing on its power - but he'd never stopped long in Haravale before, and he couldn't deal with its strangeness or his own floundering grasp on his magic. He couldn't know if it had been tampered with. _Forget it. If I sleep, I'll wake up with more energy. Probably. That's how it's meant to work, isn't it?_ He wasn't sure any more. There seemed to be less of him left every day.

_Great gods, I need to go home._

But he knew 'home' was only a fantasy. The moment he was alone, it sunk its claws into his heart; thoughts of Stef and Haven and a safe place to sleep, and Jisa, and the few other close ones he had still living. Mostly Stef. And he knew, from hard experience, that going home was nothing like his fantasy of going home. Usually he slept for most of a few days. He doubted Stef would have the time to offer what he needed, even if he wanted to. 

He thought of that night after he'd crossed the border with Favinolieth. That courier who'd brought bad news and those letters he had read over and over. He'd slept on Valdemaran earth again with Stef's words pressed against his heart, and that night he'd imagined their gentle welcome-home lovemaking. But by now, the thought of real intimacy left him cold. He couldn't feel whatever part of him used to need it - it was gnarled and chitinous, no longer reachable. _It's almost like how I felt on the way north to the Ice Wall... And that's why he left me at the border post that morning._

 _He said he was sorry for staying behind_ , but the fear wouldn't leave him, fear of losing something he didn't even know how to have.

Someone else had kindly pitched his tent, and Van slipped into the dark and curled atop his bedroll with his boots still on, closing his eyes against the world. _I can't bear being away. I can't do anything right when I'm home. I can't do anything right._

 _:Those aren't helpful thoughts, Van,:_ Taver cautioned.

Indeed not. Van tugged at the ends of his own hair in irritation. Maybe heading off alone had been a mistake. But he didn't dare ask even Tantras to share quarters with him tonight. _It's not the rumours I'm afraid of - I could hurt him. Or do worse than hurt him._

Guilt closed smothering thick over him. It was no use. Everything else led into that unrelenting spiral. 

He scrunched his eyes closed and tried to empty his mind completely. He reached gingerly for the node, and watched without thinking as the magic flowed from it. There it came, under his control, into the recesses of his power reserves...and thence fading, less than it should be. There was some place beyond his awareness where everything became _less_. Like carrying water in a cup laced with hairline cracks. What was _wrong_ with him?

 _Everything. Everything I do or think or am is going awry._ He tried to remember some point when he'd still functioned, where he felt whole and aware and his instincts weren't hopelessly out of tune.

Before he'd let Leareth touch him.

He turned his face to the earth, almost hearing Stef's response in his ears. It had become so rote that Stef didn't even sound angry any more. Van had, eventually, told him every grisly detail and Stef _still_ claimed it changed nothing between them, that a mere bodily reaction wasn't a sign he had consented to anything Leareth had done to him. _But this is the only body I've got_ , and how he wished he could claw it away into shreds. Stef could very well _say_ that when he'd felt pleasure, become hard, _shed seed_ beneath Leareth, it wasn't because he willed it. _Then what is my will even for? If pleasure can be hatred and sickness, if my body can be not my own, how do I know anything about what I feel any more?_

And without the illusion of control, his foundations gave way like sand. Nothing he felt meant anything. When had he ever felt sure of one thing in his life? _Oh, 'Lendel..._

For a long moment he simply lost himself in the memory, dark summer night and pine-needles in his hair.

He hesitated. _:Taver?:_ He'd never asked him anything so personal before.

 _:What's wrong, Van?:_

Taver sounded tired, and Van felt all the more guilty for troubling him with such inanities. But who else alive would understand? _:Do you still think about Shavri?:_

_:Of course I do.:_

_:And Lancir?:_

_:Van, I think of all of them,:_ Taver told him, and his mindvoice sounded far, far away. _:I always will. But I've found there's a difference between remembering those I've lost in the past for their own sake, and dwelling on them because something feels wrong in the present.:_

A shiver ran up Vanyel's spine. _:I don't know...:_ Taver's words struck at his intuition like a gong. Not for the first time. He had found it worth paying attention to that feeling - often, it took days or weeks after that first tremor to discover how true Taver's words had been.

 _So I'll try to be honest with myself right off the bat. When I think about Stef, that means thinking of the very real problems between us - problems there's nothing I can do about right now. When I think about 'Lendel, I can remember us as if our bright days never ended. And that's not even so bittersweet any more. I_ have _Stef, even if I don't know what to do with him._

That was it. That was all and insolubly it. And put like that, it was little wonder that in his thoughts of Stefen, he felt an edge of pain and exhaustion and fear.

He kicked off his boots and curled himself up tightly, feeling the memory of a strong arm thrown over his shoulder, soft curls against his cheek. A fierce whisper - _"Van-ashke, tell me what you need. I'm here for you."_

_I just need to sleep._

_I wish I didn't have to sleep._ Every night for weeks he'd dreamed of walls closing in on him, quaking from thunder beyond, and his body riven by a formless hunger. But for now, thinking of Tylendel brought him peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My PWP [_Uninvited Guest_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10400340) originally spun off from a very old draft of the last scene of this chapter - I was picturing the timeline differently back then and it no longer fits into the continuity, but I bet you can spot where it popped out.


	3. Chapter 3

Torrall pulled a worn white handkerchief from his sleeve and folded it in quarters. He mopped the dewfall from the table, starting at one corner and dabbing back and forth. Tired as he was, Vanyel found his meticulousness mesmerising, and he stared as Torrall's long, thin fingers moved along the rough grain of the wood, sliding the cloth into each knothole. Leaning against the uneven table, Van made certain to rub his eyes dramatically and wince at the sound of the cockerel crowing in the inn's backyard; best to hint to Torrall that he'd drunk enough last night to fuzzle his wits and forget all that had been said. In truth he'd had but one cup of ale and was entirely clear-headed, just far too weary to enjoy the advantage.

Satisfied at last, the young Herald unfurled his map atop the table. "There. Let's get our bearings." It was a much better map than the one Favinolieth had carried from Rethwallen. The canvas was rich with detail, its inked contours and topography peppered with charcoal-scrawled additions. Vanyel knew it for the work of a Farseeing Herald of a more peaceful age, a creation blended from their Gift, their travels and the mathematical arts that had always seemed to Van a kind of magic in themselves. Favinolieth leaned so close his beard almost touched the tabletop, and he traced the River Petra with a fingernail, through the point marked _Haravale_ , matching its curve southeast to the point marked _Horn_.

Van waved to Tantras to join them - Tran was deep in conversation with a hearty-looking young woman dressed in a smock and sturdy wooden-soled sandals. "Not since last frost," Van heard her say as they came closer. A milk pail hung from a hooked stick over her shoulder. "My ma says we should go stay with her sister, over west. But my pa don't like her sister, and he says the Heralds is coming again." She looked between the three of them cautiously, as if their very presence was pushing her to take sides in a domestic quarrel that she had chosen none of.

Van wanted to smile in spite of his exhaustion. _It's the littlest human things that remind me why I'm out here. Gods preserve all quarrellers and stubborn mountain folk and apathetic milkmaids._ Favinolieth looked curiously at the young woman, and Van hoped he saw the Heraldic principle that Tantras was demonstrating: _We protect by consent. Heralds need support from Valdemar's common folk just as much as they need ours, and in unfamiliar situations they often know a damned sight more than we do._

Tantras pointed to a cross-mark on the map, at the borderline southwest of Horn. "Here's where they first broke through." Valdemar hadn't been ready for the attack - not so soon, and not so far west. They'd thought, from all the signals that the new regime had been sending, that the Prophet wasn't inclined to be so aggressive as the former rulers. _But now Randi's gone, and I'm all the magic we have left. He's testing us. They're testing themselves. It wasn't a clean revolution - maybe attacking us helps heal their own civil strife. Maybe they're trying to get rid of an internal threat. They need some great monster to rail against together, and it's Valdemar. The filthy demonic mages of Valdemar. Me._ "So by last frost, Karse held the east pass into Horn Valley?" Tantras asked. The milkmaid nodded. "And they've just camped there ever since?"

The woman snorted. "Haven't _just_. They stole my cousin's cattle. Steal anything they can get. That's why I went to stay with my ma and pa over mountain. Them as didn't get out of Horn Valley, I - I don't know." _They were killed_ , Van was fairly sure. If the Karsites had taken prisoners, surely they would have been used as bargaining chips by now. "They've got the right idea," she waved toward the square, where the innkeeper, the ostler and a burly man who might well be the smith were loading up a cart together; the last of the village was packing itself away.

"So Karse isn't trying to move north yet; they're just digging in near Horn." Tran ran a hand across his brow, trailing a dark charcoal stain on his face. 

"Horn could cause them a lot of trouble if they try to push north without cracking her open," Van pointed out. 

"Makes sense. We thought they must be still there, ever since that supply escort got split off last month."

"Not just a supply escort," added Torrell. "They were guarding a caravan party and a group of Healers bound for the border region." Van's anger rose another notch. There was a deep layer of hell for those who attacked Healers. "Captain Loravon said some of the carters and Healers made it into the citadel before the Karsites drove the escort off. But that's the only new supplies they've had since winter."

"Must be ugly. Van, can you use FarSight to see the Karsite position from here?"

They were, probably, close enough now - some ten or twelve miles out - and Van nodded slowly. "I can try." He turned southeast, shading his eyes from the bright morning sun, and he focused on a mountaintop at the limit of his vision. His mortal eyes blurred over, and he rose like a hawk from that other point in space, skimming the distant ridges. "I see their banner at the west pass," he said. Some hundred soldiers, enough to control access from the east, but hardly an army. And then over the crest into Horn Valley -

His heart sank at the sight that lay below his vantage point. "There's thousands of them - they've stripped the forest to stubs - barricaded all three of the roads. Earthworks, too - they've set walls made of treetrunks and rocks around all their encampments. And they're - they're trying to break through to the citadel. They're bombarding the walls." He dropped closer, and watched as four men lifted a huge stone into the cup of a great wooden siege engine, aimed up at the walled city on the rise above them. The outer walls of Horn looked scarred, blemished and spilling rubble from their interior - but still standing. _How much more can they take?_

"Gods damnit," muttered Tran. "What about inside? Any riots?"

Vanyel stretched his vision up over the citadel walls, feeling his way through the tiny, dense streets he knew of old. Horn Citadel had a gatehouse and a keep, with a town wound tight within its curtain walls, artisans and tradesmen and an ancient temple sheltered within the thick walls. Van drifted over the low rooves of the commoners' houses, past the keep, along the wall that ran to the gatehouse. Men in helms and armour kept low behind the battlement, watching their enemy. He saw them laugh with relief, and a little madness, as the huge stone flung by the Karsite device fell short, tumbling harmlessly into the earth outside the wall. One of them flung a little sharp stone back. Vanyel's viewpoint moved to the gatehouse, and inside that vantage room where Lord Percever had always gone to watch over the southern mountains.

And there he was. Older than the image of him in Van's memory, but unmistakably Percey. Thinner, and ragged and raw at the eyes. He was deep in conversation with two others who Van couldn't quite see. He shifted closer. That was Ioun - Percey's armsmaster and faithful keeper of his secrets. He was unshorn, rangy, his gloves loose on his wrists. Vanyel turned to the other -

"No," he told Tantras, after taking a second to regain his senses. "I think it's calm - I saw a few watchmen on the walls, but I can't get a fine fix that far out. Not enough energy," he explained apologetically.

Because he didn't want to tell Tran he was going mad. 

He drew a hand across his brow, as if he could brush away the touch of those brown eyes, that desperate yearning, that _call_ that rang every false alarm in his hindbrain. Oh gods, had _anything_ he'd seen been real?

 _It's not just my Gifts - if I can't tell the difference between FarSight and waking dreams any more, I'm losing more than control. I'm losing my mind. Tran's depending on my sanity. Everyone is. It'll be months before I have any relief from that. Afterwards, I swear I'll go do_ something _to fix this. If I keep going on with such poor control, I'll do worse than seeing illusions or letting a word or a spell slip away from me._

He shook his head, trying to shake that intruding glimpse of the past. He couldn't shift that feeling of eyes looking straight into his soul, imploring him to - to what? He wanted to run and not stop. "That's a terrific crowd at their gates. It's incredible that they've not surrendered. Percever's tough under fire, but gods knows what he's had to do to keep the citizens from revolting. I never saw him as inspiring any great loyalty." He remembered that he had once called Percey a despicable louse of a man, and Percey had laughed at him as he'd slammed the door. "But now _we're_ showing in force, you're sure we can't negotiate?"

"No," said Tran shortly. "Their demands just aren't reasonable."

" _What_ are they demanding?"

Tantras froze, so it was Torrall who answered. "It's right here if you want to read it." He pulled a tattered proclamation from his bag and thumped it down on the table with much disgust. The sight of the golden sun-seal made Vanyel's stomach turn. 

He took it between cold fingertips, and scanned the text as he unrolled it. _'In the light of the atrocities both historic and recent... atonement and cleansing from the foul powers that stained the northern reaches of the Sun... the only possible assurance of meaningful peace from Valdemar... To relinquish that knowledge contrary to human peace and autonomy, which inevitably puts the world at risk of a return to the age of catastrophe...'_

Once he'd reached the final, inevitable demand, he rolled the document carefully and slipped it in his pack without a word. Torrall's mouth was set in a thin line, affronted in a way Van couldn't muster himself. "See? All they want is you. So we can't negotiate."

Vanyel closed his eyes against Tantras's pained look and for a moment, he let himself indulge in the bright fantasy of walking into the Karsite camp and immolating himself. _I can't_ , but how many people would _that_ bring relief to? _Karse's right. They know what I've done. They've every reason to fear what else I could do to their people the next time we're in conflict. And that means I put anyone who wants peace in an impossible situation. As long as I have magic, Karse isn't safe. I'm not sure anyone on Velgarth is. If I'm this short on control, they're absolutely right about the risk of catastrophe. And I can't ask Valdemar to trust me. I don't even trust myself to sleep in the same bed as my lifebonded, for hells' sake. I've done nothing to put myself right and it's infecting everything I do._

The FarSight vision - if that had ever been what it was - flashed through his mind again, a golden balm against the black shame that threatened to smother him. _Maybe I am to be Called today. I'm not sure that's a worse thought than that I'm uncontrollably hallucinating things I wish I could see but never will again._

"We can't negotiate," he repeated slowly. _Never. They can't ask me for peace when I have none to give._

"But you can defeat them, surely?"

Torrall looked far too excited by the prospect and Vanyel all but snarled at him. "You mean with magic? Yes, I _could_. But probably not without destroying the citadel as well. And every bare inch of Horn Valley would be soaked in blood in front of Favinolieth's people, most of whom are deathly afraid of me already." He was so _tired_ of being near people who feared or adored him. _I'm not just a mindless weapon. But I've done nothing but play into their hands - I've been as flashy and frightening as I can be. Fath's people are_ just _as scared of me as Karse._ "This is what they mean, isn't it? Maybe they _want_ me to clear out their besiegers. They hear I'm haring for Rethwallen, then they surround Horn and send you this screed so that when I retaliate, they have proof it was all true. They want to poison this alliance." He looked Fath dead in the eye, and felt the prince fighting to hold his gaze. The deep brown of his eyes thinned to the rim, but he didn't back away from Vanyel's anger and despair. _So I frighten you. I frighten you in every way I could and I've tried so hard to show you I'm more than what you fear, and I know you're still trying to see that. There's something in me you still find human. But what if I have no choice left?_

"My troops can fight them, alongside yours. My spearmen will charge them from over the pass -" Fath speculated.

"Then Horn Valley will be soaked in the blood of _three_ armies." Van shook his head. "There's got to be a better way. A way to get them _away_ from there without slaughtering thousands of men." His unfocused eyes settled on Torrall. "Wait, didn't Tantras say your gift is Fetching?"

 

Van dismounted beneath a copse of trees, and signalled for Torrall to do the same; he drew a deep breath, and rested a hand against Taver's shoulder as he mustered his strength and focus. Illusions required exactly the kind of fine control that had lately escaped him. He looked at Torrall in the thin moonlight, and fold by fold, he wrapped the young man's body with the image of a Karsite soldier's garb; once he was satisfied with Torrall's appearance, he applied the same illusion to himself. 

Beneath the pretense, they were both dressed in the plain shirts and grey breeches that the Guard wore beneath their uniform tunics. If they were to be discovered, it would be as spies, but not demonic Heralds.

He leaned his face against Taver's neck, and breathed the familiar scent of him, letting the breeze brush his Companion's mane over his head. This was the most dangerous thing he'd done since Taver had Chosen him, and they couldn't even be together for it. _:If we die out there, I'm going to take a lot of them with me,:_ he promised.

In return, he Felt all of Taver's pride and faith in him. _:I won't count that a fair trade, beloved,:_ Taver replied. _:But you know what you're headed into, and you know you can handle it.:_

 _:Do I know, though?:_ he asked, bitterly. _:I'm not sure anything I Saw was real. Not after... Did you see him?:_ he asked.

 _:Naught but a golden glimpse of a man,:_ Taver replied. Not asking. Because if he'd asked, Van could not have lied to him, and even now Taver would grant that courtesy to his addle-brained Chosen.

 _:It was 'Lendel,:_ he said flatly. _:I saw Tylendel and Percever side by side right there in Percever's gatehouse. Which means it wasn't FarSight at all.:_

_:Then what was it?:_

_:It was me. Something I put in there myself. I feel like I'm falling apart -:_ And the emotion suddenly burst out of him - the fear of his own thoughts, his own body, trapped on every side by people he couldn't trust on even the basest human level, and always so close to losing everything he had left. But his Companion didn't waver. He felt Taver's love, and his worry, and a trust that he hadn't earned and somehow couldn't lose. _:I'm losing my mind and I might die but I have you,:_ he said, needing Taver to know how much that mattered. That he'd honour their bond, as best as he was still able.

 _:Always,:_ and Taver couldn't lie to him, and they both knew _always_ wasn't true. Van stepped back to look that paradox straight in the eye, and for a moment he lost himself completely, in a blue like the heart of an old star; an ancient fire that would not die. _:Wind to thy wings,:_ and Van felt a twinge of pride that he'd taught Taver that parting. _Dozens of bonds, and I can still make a little impression on him. He'll think of me..._

He turned, and found Torrall leaning close against Masha, sharing a moment of their own. A moment later, he looked around, and Van nodded and set off uphill.

The tree cover thinned above them; Van went up the steep trail to the pass at a half-run, Torrall in his footsteps. _:If we get stopped by their watchmen, say nothing,:_ Van warned him. _:I'll deal with them if I have to.:_ Torrall nodded, and they carried on up the incline.

His lungs were burning by the time the hill plateaued. It was easier to see now. The trees up here were thinly spread, and dawn ghosted at the eastern horizon. Vanyel remembered riding this road one evening years ago, crossing the pass and seeing the faraway firelight of Horn below him, lamplight and warm chimneys and, somewhere, Percever, never an easy sleeper, striding about the keep with a candle clutched in his hands; now the city was dark, unplaceable in the night, but ringed with Karsite campfires.

Most of the Karsite troops at the pass still slept, and the guard at the watchpost merely grunted at them, absorbed in her awaiting of the dawn. They marched on into the valley without meeting her eyes. Beneath the next cluster of trees, he reached for Torrall's arm. _:We won't have long after we reach the camp. The Guard and Fath's army will reach the pass soon after dawn, and then our part is done. So we need to split up - I'll go north across the river, you go south around the citadel.:_ He Sent an image from his aborted FarSight vision; the crude fortifications around the Karsite camp, the citadel's bruised walls looming defiantly above the enemy. _:Once Tantras is close, I'm going to light the signal fires at their northern guard post.:_ About as far away from Tran's direction as it could be. _:At that point, you'll be in danger. Keep an eye out for places to hide.:_

Torrall Sent an affirmative, and his mindtouch to Vanyel was in absolute trust and more than a little awe. Van looked away to the dark northern sky. _If he knew the least thing about me, I would disgust him. He'd never touch my mind._

They marched downhill in silence. It took about a candlemark to reach the edge of the encircling Karsite camp. The Karsite invaders had barricaded the west road with a wall of earth and timber, higher than Vanyel was tall, and broad enough that a man could stand astride it - and several did. A little ripple of the citadel's curtain wall. It would be dangerous. Was there an easier point of entry? But someone saw him, shouted down at him. Vanyel made the sign of the sun at his forehead, and the man called down at them again - a question - and as Torrall mimicked his foreign salute, Vanyel just shook his head glumly, projecting his very real futility and weariness.

The man reached down along the crude steps built into the barricade, and offered Vanyel his hand. 

_No time to think. Never, ever time to think_ , and he took what he was offered, a thin and tired hand in his own. That casual touch hoisting him upward only gave him a deeper rapport with his enemy - the man had little hope, little conviction. Only love and camaraderie, and an abiding urge to see the sun, as if dawn would make the world well again. He was, Van realised, a desertion waiting to happen. One more cloudy sunrise could do the trick.

Van muttered his thanks, and helped Torrall up after him. He breathed harder than he had to, an excuse not to reply as the soldier gave them his instructions, and he nodded obediently. They clambered down into the darkened camp, and Vanyel turned, made the sunmark again before picking his way north toward the old ford he remembered, past rows of mouldering canvas tents and flimsy wooden shelters and sleeping men and ashen firepits. He smelt wet embers and the stench of a badly covered outhouse. He glanced behind, and saw Torrall heading away from him, past one of the great siege engines.

 _:Get at least fifty paces away from the river first,:_ Van reminded him. _:The longer you stay safe, the more damage we can do before Tantras and Fath arrive.:_

 _:Understood,:_ Torrall promised. _:Let's break things.:_

 

Vanyel curled on the earth in a gap between two rows of sleeping soldiers. He pulled his damp cloak over his body and feigned sleep with his eyes slitted open. If his disguise had one flaw, it was that he had kept too faithful to the image of the Karsite holy warrior. The men who slept around him, or walked slow patrols through the camp, looked tattered and mouse-eaten and too thin for their clothes. _How long have they been here? I keep losing time - I knew they were ready to move when I left Haven, and that was how long ago?_ He filtered through his surroundings; stacks of wood and coal, sleeping bodies, dreaming minds. Siege engines, sacks of grain. Tired earth pummelled by hooves and footprints. A sun sigil scraped on a fencepost, a fading red banner. Flimsy articles of faith.

He rarely used his Gift of Fetching. _At least that means it hasn't tried to drive me mad yet_ , he reflected, and collapsed the fence about a corral that held about a dozen horses. He gently nudged the dumb beasts awake, tapping their noses like a fly. No need to do more yet. He hunkered down, and ran his mind over stacks of supplies. He was loath to damage food or water or fuel. Arrows, however... He split the neat stacks of Karsite arrows into splinters.

To the north, he felt the shape of one of their huge siege engines, pointed at the citadel with a stack of those great stones beside it. The size of it staggered him. He could have simply broken it, but he felt Tantras and his troops drawing nearer by the moment. _More chaos_ , he decided. He stared at the ropes that bound the great machine at its base, and he _twisted_ one of the threads into flame.

Just a small fire. It would take time for the Karsites to notice, amid their beacons and campfires, and he rolled to his knees and crept on through the camp. He was looking for something more prominent - a banner - the commander's post. Faraway, he heard a great crash. A shout rang out. He heard a twisting, breaking sound as a makeshift wall collapsed into the shelter beside it. A horse yelled - and bolted. _Well done, Torrall._

The dumb animal fled mindlessly across the camp, its herd at its heels, and Vanyel ripped apart the earth and timber wall that was in their path. Someone screamed, and all at once the camp was rousing around him. He turned to the half-awake, panicked men behind him and yelled one of the few Karsite phrases he knew, one he'd heard many a time in the past. _"We're under attack!"_

He drew his sword and ran, ducking behind a tent, yelling the phrase twice more and ignoring the responses, running off again. _I am your worst soldier, a panicking fool and would-be deserter_ , he decided, and heard another shout go up behind him - someone had noticed that the siege engine was on fire. He fanned the flames til they caught the nearest tent. He was almost at the north edge of the curtain wall now - and there was the great sun-banner of Karse, flying high above the commander's post.

Keeping low, he ran toward the banner. He was near the camp's makeshift kitchen, and he ripped the earth around the great firepit open wider, sending two half-asleep men down into the smouldering ashes. He heard them screaming for aid as he moved on. There were six more horses tethered near the the command post to the north of him, and he loosed them and flashed a tiny magelight into one stallion's eyes. The beast startled, and raced toward the citadel.

Most of the soldiers were now moving against him - toward his trail of sabotage, or Torrall's, or in panic from the scattering animals and spreading flames, or simply uphill to the west, looking for attackers - and soon enough, straight into Favinolieth's spearmen. He hunkered down, pulling more power from Horn Valley's old, familiar node before creeping on toward the banner. Was that the commander? A sash over his robe, a plume - most likely. Vanyel ran, and he pointed and yelled at one of the ring of men that surrounded the banner, exhorting them as best he could with his voice - _one of Stef's tricks_ , and he tried to bury the thought as fast as it came. The elite soldiers ran the way he'd pointed, and Van stumbled against the commander, flailing and babbling like a panicked madman, and he shoved the man back into his own tent. His mind picked through the bedroll - _no one there_ \- trust a holy Karsite warlord to sleep piously alone - and he leapt onto the commander's chest as he tried to rise, elbow to his throat, drawing his dagger from his boot and up to his enemy's neck in one smooth motion.

Van smothered the man's scream with his body, and felt hot, wet blood seeping into his shirt. _At least it won't show past the illusion. Beats ruining another set of Whites._ He spun on his knee, and wiped his dagger on the dead man's breeches. Had anyone seen, or heard? He set fire to the sun banner outside the tent above them. That would frighten away anyone nearby, and besides, he wanted to see it burn.

 _Nothing for it._ He ducked out of the tent, rolling about the corner of it as fast as he could, headlong into a man fleeing - _"We're under attack!"_ the soldier yelled at him, and Van nodded and pointed frantically to the south. A group of archers ran past them, and he snapped every bowstring with a finesse that pleased him. It was such a relief seeing _one_ of his Gifts truly _work_.

He ran twenty yards further, and he heard a shout and a splash - some impious fool trying to douse their blazing banner with a bucket of water - and they'd know, in moments, that the commander was dead, and Vanyel fell in step with the man to his left, fleeing toward the south. They passed a crude wooden shelter, and he split off behind it - it looked like a stand for the Karsite archers, built to protect them from missiles sent down from the citadel. He was in sight of the north beacon. The sky was coming alive with clear morning twilight. Where were Tran and Fath?

 _I ought to use FarSight to look over the pass_ , but he mind-called Taver rather than risk another glimpse of his own madness. _:Almost,:_ and he could feel the chase in Taver's blood, and sense Delian and Masha running beside him, at the head of the first wave of the attack. _:Beloved, it's time.:_ And he caught a glimpse, as if through his own eyes, of Taver charging into the guardpost he and Torrall had grunted their way past a mere candlemark ago, racing the dawn into Horn Valley, and he reached up the hill with his mind and lit the warning beacon the Karsites had erected on the road beyond the citadel, to warn of attack from the north.

The sun rose onto chaos.

Karse's enemies - headed by three white demons - charged down from the west, and with the north warning lit, they could fight on two flanks or they could flee. In moments word would spread that they had no leader. Their siege machines were burning or shattered. Their archers had what arrows they carried, of little use before they were run down by thousands of their foes. Beside the shelter, Vanyel heard a man mutter the words of the dawn prayer to Vkandis in despair.

 _Run_ , he told the man silently.

East to the sun, or south to home. _Run from here._

He felt the rout begin as Taver, Masha and Delian descended toward the shattered earthworks, Fath and the first wave of his army at their heels. Vanyel saw through Taver's eyes again, men climbing over their crude walls and each other to escape on the south road, running for their lives. For the few who stood and fought, the Companion had no mercy.

Vanyel focused on his illusory disguise, blending it into the wood-grain and dirt floor of his hiding place until he couldn't be seen at all. _:That went well.:_ He couldn't have prayed for the sabotage attack to go better. Horn would soon be liberated, with little slaughter. Without using his frighteningly erratic Mage-Gift. Without allowing the Karsites anything but humiliation. Fath and his army would chase the them to the border to answer to the Sunlord for their burned banner and lost glory.

He hid for another candlemark, taking whatever chances he found to encourage the stragglers to flee, and when all around him had gone, he silently exalted in the victory. He was alive. Taver and Tantras were safe. And Torrall? He followed the thread between them, feeling him closer than expected. _:Where are you?:_

_:In the citadel - Percever's men let me inside.:_

_:Dressed like a Karsite?:_ He wanted to laugh.

The younger Herald's thoughts came to him in a jumble. _:Yes - told them who I was - Fetched the gate open - Lord Percever asked me things only a Herald would know. They were lucky - almost all the citizens survived - stayed together and peaceful -:_ The spirit behind his words was the purest Valdemaran thing that Vanyel knew, people who would do anything for each other to live together. It was in every song of the Founding. He felt Torrall's thankfulness for it radiating from his mind.

 _:Is Percever well?:_ he asked, surprised how much he still cared. _:And his people?:_

 _:Yes - hungry but in such good spirits - we're going to run for the Karsite supplies. Been under barrage from archers and catapults - they shared all their food and cared for their wounded - those Healers_ did _make it in here. And a Bard came with them - I can't believe it - I think I misjudged him -:_

The illusion fell apart around him.

Vanyel pulled back from Torall's mind before his anguish could escape from his buckling shields. All the pieces came together, each damnable clue twisting about the next until they felt like a rope at his neck. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe.

_I should have known._

_I saw_ Tylendel _next to Percever when I used FarSight to look into the citadel and I was so sure it was because I'd lost my mind. How many times have they changed places in my dreams before now? And not one new letter in months? Last year he wrote to me like my life depended on it. I kept losing power. I kept thinking about being here. I should have_ known all along _that Stef was here._

Slowly, Vanyel rose to his feet, found his hands caked in dirt where he'd curled them into the churned earth. He stared up at the citadel, dawn breaking on its cracked curtain walls, and he swallowed down his fury. _What in the cold hells was he thinking?_

He reached back to Torrall, shielding out every thought he could find before resuming their contact. _:I'm heading to the citadel. Tell Lord Percever I'm coming,:_ he said. Not a word for Stef. Van would deal with him face to face.


	4. Chapter 4

Taver came back to Vanyel on the road outside the citadel. He was an angel aflame, dawn light on his flanks and blood drying on his forelegs. Vanyel met the cold satisfaction in his eyes with his own simmering, helpless fury, and it was only then that he realised how little strength he had left. The first time they'd ever stood on a battlefield together, and any triumph he might have felt had run like water through the cracks in his mind. It was impossible to even put into words how _stupid_ he felt.

"I need to see Stef," he said. He felt a low terror rumble below his ribs. "I _know_ I should be out there chasing the Karsites back to the border -"

_:Delian says Favinolieth has them in hand. He's leading the Guard's charge south now. Fath and Tantras decided that the Heralds should see that their people were safe.:_

Already, he saw a swell of people streaming from the citadel, Torrall and a band of rangy youths, collecting everything the Karsites had abandoned - grain, fuel, and he saw Masha walking tightening circles around a herd of escaped cattle in the south of the valley. Roal's corps of Healers were riding down from the pass, escorted by a dozen Guardsmen.

He leaned against his Companion's shoulder for a moment before pulling himself up into the saddle, spreading his hands over Taver's neck and trying to take a shred of strength from his trust. Taver picked his way up the overgrown track to the gates of Horn, past the sharp stones and old nails that littered the path. _They never gave an inch,_ Van realised. _Never let the enemy get near their doors without welcoming them with all they'd got. There's mountain hospitality. Percey should be proud._ Van loathed Percey's arrogance but today he had the right.

A shout from the gates - someone chanting his name - and he put all those feelings aside and set that mask over his face as best he could, to be Herald Vanyel, Monarchs' Own and the last Herald-Mage of Valdemar; something more than an exhausted, angry man who needed to confront his errant partner before he lost his last thread of self-control. He straightened in the saddle, making the most of the view as they neared the gates. Taver was a hand taller than Yfandes, and Valdemar had sung his name for generations. It meant something, to ride into Horn like this. He didn't have to play the heroic victor alone. Taver was much more suited for the role than he was.

The crowd spilled from the gates to surround them, and Taver raised his head high; Van tried to hide his shock at the thin arms raised toward him, the sickly-looking children, the woman whose loose chemise drooped from her bony shoulder. _They look like they're down to scraped bones and sawdust here. How on earth did they not surrender?_ Taver turned a slow, deliberate circle in the courtyard to make space for Vanyel to dismount. As soon as he'd stepped foot on the worn stone flags, a man in armoured regalia held out willow-branch arms to him.

It was Ioun - Percey's armsmaster. Vanyel held his welcome for a long moment. "It's a relief to see you again -"

Ioun laughed, and the sound was as light as the wind whistling in a chimney flue. "Don't let me start, Herald. This is a miracle." He dropped Van's arms and made a sign to the gods above them. _He was never pious,_ Van recalled, _I don't remember much piety here at all - Percey never encouraged it, and even his wife gave up on that pretense. It's been that bad - of course it's been that bad._ But looking at the faces pressed around them, he didn't see a shred of ill-feeling. _They've all borne it together. Somehow._

"If I could ask an audience with Lord Percever -"

"Less of that formal crap," Ioun gave him a warm grin that only made his hollow cheeks look the stranger to Van. Ioun still had enough presence to shoulder a way through the crowd, even if his strength looked much the less. "His lordship is pleased as punch that it was _you_ come break us out."

His meaning was clear on his face. If Ioun hadn't known, all those years ago, he'd guessed. _Fantastic._ Ioun pulled open the door of the gatehouse - always Percey's favourite haunt, but Percey was rapidly fading from Van's attention as that stretched sense of his _other_ , the life that was part of him and not, grew close enough to feel, almost to touch. There was no one in the gatehouse's lower hall. Percey's hunting trophies - a great white stag, two mountain lions - made their glass-eyed vigil above an empty fireplace. Van set a hand to the sandstone wall as he followed Ioun up the stairs, feeling the resilience of those old stones. He refused to let a hint of his unsteadiness show. He flicked his cloak neatly over his shoulder, and ran a hasty hand through his hair. _I am going to be The Herald Mage and they can_ both _try their best to make good with that._

Van stepped up into the gatehouse's upper room. He no longer waited for his moment to make an entrance; The Herald Mage was always an event. The hall was little changed from his memories; bright with sunlight from the windows over the courtyard; mere arrow-slits opened over the citadel walls, and from here Percey had watched their enemy, called down to his citizens in the courtyard, made plans over his sturdy leather-topped desk (oh how Van remembered that desk) and warmed himself at the open fire with his books - but where had his books gone? Percey had made speeches, no doubt - gods, Percey loved the sound of his own voice. But in this moment, he had lost it mid-sentence. He stared with his mouth held open in a perfect pink circle, silent in the face of Vanyel's implacability. He was gaunt, something Vanyel thought he'd never see. He'd been plump back when they'd been lovers, and if it had seemed from Vanyel's occasional visits thereafter that if marriage had padded him out, divorce had done so all the more.

And Stefen sat on the edge of that desk, one leg folded under him. He looked well enough; he wore an extra layer of rough-spun brown linen clothes over shabby Scarlets, like a poor man in winter. He dared to meet Vanyel's gaze, and smiled like a bright midwinter dawn. Van's heart sang at the sight, grating and shrill with disuse. _Damn him to all hells._

"Lord Percever," Van said, his eyes slowly and reluctantly drawing away from Stefen. "Prince Favinolieth of Rethwallen is escorting your visitors away - I came to see to the care of your people."

Percey finally recovered his power of speech. "Vanyel - Herald, I - no, Van, gods be damned, you'll always be Van to me," and Vanyel seethed at his proprietary expression. "However did you do it? Never mind. You'll tell me. But great good _gods_ , I thought I was dreaming when I saw them running from our walls. We were days from the end of everything. It's a damned good thing we had Bard Stefen - if he hadn't been here, Karse would've had the city a month ago."

Stef shook his head, and slipped down from his perch to stand on his feet, swaying a little under the weight of Vanyel's fury. His movements were so slight - economical - but he seemed well enough. "Milord, your citizens are better than that."

"No one should have held out a siege like that. I can't believe it's over." He stared at Van, his familiarity cut with awe.

"Vanyel did always tell me not to underestimate the power of music," Stef smiled through thin, pale lips.

"You're friends?" Percey sounded deflated. 

_He would have tried to show Stef off to me like a child with a new toy._ It was as ironic as it was annoying. "We're acquainted," Van confirmed. Stef raised his chin defiantly - and Van had an odd feeling of vertigo, as if he teetered at the edge of a pit. Maybe Stef was lower on energy than he'd first seemed - his eyes looked dim, his focus flickering. Yet he seemed well.

"Somewhat," Stef added, his weary smirk not reaching his eyes.

There was only so much politeness Van could stand. "Bard Stefen," he gestured to the door in the corner. It led to a balcony that Van well remembered from that chilly night he'd spent evading Percey's former wife, an escapade that had made him swear off married men for good. "We need to talk. I won't be long," he assured Percey and Ioun as Stefen opened the door, still moving slowly, stiffly, his jaw set in its most stubborn line.

_He's in no mood to back down - but neither am I_ , he determined. He closed the door behind them. "What in hells are you _doing_ here?" he hissed.

"My duty," Stef replied, and he leaned delicately on the balustrade as Vanyel spluttered. "I joined a corps of Healers heading for the Border, and we holed up in here when the Karsites attacked our caravan."

War Healers worked strictly behind the lines, _out_ of combat. Vanyel knew that. They'd saved his life thrice, all decades ago. They were still _at great risk_. "Why would Jisa and Treven have ever assigned you away from Haven?"

"Because I asked them to. I was tired of just _sitting_ there when I knew the Border needed Bards _and_ Healers. What would you have of me? What have you always told me?" Stef's eyes sawed dangerously into him. His voice was a fierce whisper. "You heard Percever. I kept this city whole through more than a month of siege and barrages. We had _nothing_ reaching us, and we made it. I kept them calm. I kept them sharing what they had - even Percey and his cousins and the merchants and the priests - I made them share every scrap of food and fuel. I never let anyone feel pain or despair. And I don't care what you think, I'll count that worthwhile." Stef's hands trembled on the stones, and he breathed hoarsely, like the mere force of words had winded him. "I used my Gift to do something no one else could. _You_ always told me that's all that mattered."

Van clutched at his hair with his hands. "Don't you _dare_ turn my own words on me. You _promised_ me you'd stay safe -"

"I'm safe now you're here -"

"- In Haven," he finished, furious. "If the Border needed a damned Bard -"

"Horn needed me. There's people who wouldn't have made it without me. There's people who might have started a riot without me." He rocked where he sat on the balustrade, the wind lifting his thin hair. Loose strands of it wafted away. "But thank the gods you came," and he looked gentle into Vanyel's anger. "Don't know how much rope we had left. I only wanted to see you again. I wanted you to know what I did," and Van felt a flash of _\- resignation -_ like a dark cloud crossing the morning sun.

_What's wrong with you?_ He took Stefen by the shoulders, and his beloved seemed strangely small in his hands. Layers of cloth folded between his knuckles. But Stefen looked well enough, Stefen looked well enough _and my eyes slide off him when I try to look at him, because he's well enough, everything will be well enough_ and he felt his mind catch in swirling fog. Stefen looked well enough and Van _flailed_ at the empathic glamour with his shields, struggling to see with his own eyes. With his hands. Cold in the hollows of Stefen's shoulders. A clutch of hair fell away in his hand. 

He was holding almost nothing. 

"When did you last eat?" he demanded and Stef shrugged, or tried to.

"Been a couple of days. I gave my food yesterday to the younglings - I guess they can take care of themselves now," and he turned to stare over the walls, at the youths carrying their spoils of war back to the citadel. Vanyel could see every vertebra on his neck, and the skeletal ghastliness of him wasn't even the worst of the things Vanyel could suddenly perceive. _He's got_ no _energy. And he's keeping up at least two projective Empathic effects with the energy he_ doesn't have _. How can he be even standing? Surely the pain alone -_

"I'm very tired," he admitted, but looked up at Vanyel with that too familiar stubbornness, and Van caught him in his arms because Stef was too proud to fall.

"Stef," he asked. "Are you blocking your own pain?"

Stef's eyes had lost any tangible focus, and his head slumped against Van's shoulder. _How can he be blocking his pain if he's got no energy to be doing it with?_ Van turned his Magesight deep inside him, through his disguises, dreading what he might see. _What could he possibly have left?_

He saw less than nothing. 

It was worse than he'd dared to fear. 

He _saw_ the empathic workings of Stef's relentless, infectious hope, and his blase disguise - the two effects were running his Bardic Gift so raw that anyone else would have been in agony. His pain-dampening Gift looped a knot of power through his projective channels, holding all that he was together, numb and cold, as the totality of him sank into quicksand.

 

Vanyel's arms barely felt strained by the weight of Stef's body. "Ioun, I need my packs." And he didn't care for what discussion he'd interrupted, nor did he care for the gormless surprise on Percey's face. "Immediately," he added. "Where does Stefen sleep?"

"In the east room over the courtyard - he's taken ill?"

"Looked well, did he?" Van hissed. He reached for Torrall's mind as he shouldered open the door. _:Can you find Healer Roal and send her to the east turret of the gatehouse? Not_ anyone _else. I need Roal, and as soon as possible.:_ He heard Percey following him down the hallway. "Open the east room door," he called to a young servant in the hallway. The room beyond looked half-empty, bare sandstone walls and blank wooden boards. Had all Horn's treasures had been stripped for firewood? The bed was still intact, and Van set Stef down, pulling blankets over his body and pulling the bedcurtains half closed. Not enough. He added a warming spell. _He's barely keeping his own blood warm._

"What's the matter with him?" called Percey, staring in shock from the doorway.

Vanyel forcibly reminded himself that this wasn't Percey's fault. "He fainted." _If it took_ me _so much effort to see through that act, Percey hadn't a chance._ But the lord might at least have some idea how long this had been going on. "Does he take meals with you?"

"Meals were a moon ago," Percey groused. "We had our share of the scraps once a day. He likes to eat with the children. Sings at them and keeps them on the hunt. They lure out songbirds and vermin and catch them. That Bard's _uncouth_ ," he added with approval. "He used the last of my Ceejan black pepper to entice me to eat a rat. Told me I could dine out on that story in Haven," and a shudder ran through him, as if months of deprivation and horror had only just registered in his mind. "Gods, how many Haven Bards would know how to skin a rat," and he laughed with disgust. "He had me burn my books, Van. My precious books. He made me _want_ to toss them into bread-ovens."

Van looked away coldly. The last thing he wanted was to admit that Stef had been right, in any way. Ioun stumbled in like a blessing, beladen with Van's packs, Torrall right behind him. Vanyel upended his medical kit and his sack of provisions on the sheets. "Here," and he tossed Percey and Ioun a cut of Rethwalleni cheese and a heel of bread. "Did you see Healer Roal?" he asked the young Herald, ignoring the near-ecstatic sounds of Percey eating.

"She was in the middle of a Healing - I left word that she was needed here." Vanyel bit back a curse. "He didn't look ill when I got here," muttered Torrall.

"He was using his Gift to make everyone around him _think_ he was doing fine," Van replied through gritted teeth.

"Why would he do that?"

Van sagged against the bedpost. The question would have enraged him if it hadn't been on the tip of his own tongue. "I, I don't -"

"He had to," said Percey. "Gods, I hung on his every word. He roamed the city with a crowd at his back every night, and he sang about the Heralds - one song from him was as good as three meals. He _promised_ us that the Heralds were coming to fight off Karse. He said _you_ would come," and he stared at Vanyel in wonder. "I told him they'd barter our scalps to Karse for bread first, but he'd have none of it. He kept telling them that if we helped each other, if we waited and held strong together, we'd survive..." Percey shivered, his dry hands curling in his lap. "Who would have believed him if they'd seen him looking like _that_? Not me, for sure. And I believed him. Every word. I believed what he said about you. And gods damn him, here you are."

It was very like Percey - and Stef - to understand this thing Vanyel hadn't, the way survival could turn on _appearances_. "He kept it up _all the time_?" asked Torrall. "I've never heard of a Bard who could do that - or _anyone_ who could do that."

_You're impossible._ Terror cut through Vanyel as he laid a hand on Stef's brow, looking for his energy. _You kept this city alight - but what's left of your fire now?_

Stef's reserves were gone - past gone - yet Vanyel still felt the machinations of his Gift turning deep inside him. Making him look like more than he was. Stopping his own pain. He should have been _forced_ to stop pretending all was well, to rest and recover til it didn't hurt any more.

The pain-numbing Gift seemed to ebb in a low spiral, each trickle of self-generated energy flowing briefly down its channels before trickling away into its own numbness. Leaving nothing left. Nothing, still burning. Consuming energy Stef didn't have in reserve. Energy that came from rest and food that Stef wasn't taking because he never had to feel the need for anything but the music. Deep inside, he still sang.

After reserved energy was gone, power fed on life itself. That's how blood magic worked. That's how a Final Strike worked. Stef's Gifts were eating him alive.


	5. Chapter 5

Vanyel brushed Stef's hair from his eyes with shaking fingers. He listened with less than half an ear as Percey and Torrall talked about salvaging the Karsite supplies, about keeping that cobweb-thin peace, about foraging and fuel. He felt Torrall's curious stare as he left, and heard Percey stomp down the hallway, restless with hunger, and the beat of his retreating footsteps was like an old, familiar song.

He was fully focused on the way Stef's energy moved; it was like trying to watch a trickle of water deep below drought-parched earth. He Felt that trickle along the raw contours of Stef's channels - the power was as easy to reroute as if it were his own. It _was_ his own, on some terrifying level.

He cut the empathic projections that had disguised Stef's deterioration and smothered all who saw him in hope. That would save his strength and give his channels time to rest - but the pain-numbing loop was still turning. Van tried dampening it, restricting its passage. He felt the fiery edge of his beloved's pain even through sleep. _That's worrying - I won't tamper any more without Roal's advice._

There was little more he could do but wait. He sank into the deep, familiar node below the citadel - a bright flower of abundance untouched by the weeks of siege. It responded easily to his touch, and he brought its energy through his focus-stone, taking all he needed from it and making the power his own. When he'd gathered all he needed, he Sent its line of energy to Stef through the deep link between them. He watched the power flow across the hazy borderline between their energies, into Stef's loop, barely any of it staying with him as fuel. _Damn._ Power ran frictionless between them, finding its steep gradient down - down - down. There was a hollow place, silent where he expected to hear the quiet rhythms and whispers of a living system.

It was so empty, so _wrong_ , that Van felt shunted aside by terror, pushed outside of time, down into the emptiness. He found himself staring blankly through the small window that sat in the grey stone wall of the gatehouse; at this angle, he saw only rooftops and angular gables, Horn's unaltered skeleton, a Horn that hadn't and wouldn't change no matter what human tragedy befell her. A nonstop murmur of people, a clatter of hooves. He heard more cheering, dimly and far away - Tantras had arrived. He was drifting somewhere years ago, long before Stefen, a time when he'd tolerated Percey because he didn't know himself well enough not to. The node, soft in Percey's bed. That reckless affair, cold tiles beneath his toes, an indignity that had settled on his skin like dust. An illicit fumble was all he had come to expect, and it was only a way to pass the time between dances with Death.

In the mornings, this room lay in shadow. Van thought that the better for it, with so little left inside. He was dizzy, as if the stones around him were quaking and coming apart. Everything that held the world together had drained into the emptiness.

The door opening brought him startling back, and Van was on his feet and halfway across the room in an instant, ready to defend Stef with all his strength - but it was Lord Percever again, of course Percever, because only Percey would still be fool enough to walk in on him unexpected. _Of all his beastly habits, his refusal to knock upon any door in Horn might be the worst._

Percever looked drunk on liberation. It made his eyes bright, and licked red tongues of fire on his cheeks. "I brought food for Bard Stefen," he said, waving the wooden bowl he held with quite undue fanfare. In it Van saw a couple of the small, dark bread loaves of the type Van had once lived off on the border, and a handful of berries. Vanyel remembered that brushing aside his servants to carry up necessities personally was what Percey used to do when he wanted something that Van was too tired for but had often given him anyway; he stared coldly, hoping to hells that Percey would know better than that today (and any other day). "Is he awake?"

"No," Van said tightly. "Thanks, I'll make sure he eats later."

"Flew too close to the moon," Percey quoted the legend. _Damned fool._ He set down his offering on the nightstand, and gazed down at Stef with a raw admiration that cut Vanyel's defenses to ribbons. "What a man. A madman, I thought, but he was right, wasn't he? You're here." Van choked back his anger. _He should never have been here. Someone else could have -_ but _could_ anyone else do what Stef had done? "He talked like a fanatic. Like you were some god who would drop down on us from the sky. Took me weeks to realise he didn't believe it at all, but he persuaded himself so thoroughly that we hung on his every word."

Vanyel looked aside, silently cursing himself and Percey both. "That sounds like - something he'd do," he allowed.

"It's damned lucky he's on our side - a few pretty words and I think he could convince _me_ to set down my cup and take up arms against anyone. May the gods not rob us of such a lovely and singular creature." Van shot him an utterly poisonous look and Percey smirked insufferably. "Don't be so prim. I had to try, no better way to pass away a siege, and he's so perfectly the type. But he said he's spoken for - I pleaded with him for one last great adventure before we all died, but he wouldn't budge. Sheer superstition, I'll wager. Like going to bed together would mean admitting the jig was up and he'd never go home to his sweetheart again." Vanyel's stare would have torn any other man's tongue from his mouth, but to Percey it was but an inducement to goad him further. "Oh, don't tell me it's you? It _is_ you!" he cried in triumph. "If I'd known it was you..." _You would have redoubled your efforts, I am sure._ Percey sniffed. "Well, don't _you_ ever fret. He's loyal as a dog."

"Maybe he's simply too polite to admit that he wasn't interested in you."

Van regretted the comment immediately. A quarrel would bring Percey far too much pleasure. "Really, Van? I sensed some chemistry between he and I." That, Van didn't dignify with a response. "You said you weren't looking to settle down," Percey continued.

The phrase was loaded with disdain. It was not true, as Percey had once alleged, that he and Vanyel were at all similar. Close in age and station, but even if he had kept his place as a Lord Holder in waiting, Van doubted he would have carried on Percey's life of rancid adultery. "Neither was he," Van replied flatly.

"So he persuaded you both?"

_Damn you._ "Yes." Percey had always fought like a matador - taunting men to rage, then striking for the heart. "Yes, he did."

"And how did that happen?"

"Ask him. He'll tell it better than me." _Have some superstition_ , he thought. _Stef would never let a story lie half-told. Never. Never._

Percey shifted from foot to foot, an unusual compassion in his eye. "You need aught else for him?"

"I need Healer Roal," he replied, swallowing his frustration. "But there's one other thing," he added. "If he should pass through here - and I expect he will - could you make a point of spending some time with Prince Favinolieth?"

"What? You're drafting me as a diplomat now? What do you think _I_ can get out of those foreign prudes?"

Van hesitated. It was no more than a strong hunch, but Percey had once pursued Van on no deeper evidence, and look where _that_ had got them. "I think he might be one of us."

Percey emitted his immensely irritating high-pitched laugh. "A Rethwalleni prince? Gods forfend."

"I could be wrong, but I think it's at least a strong possibility. I'd like to know what you make of him." Van could usually tell the feel of someone _shay'a'chern_ from one who was just gawping at a passing legend. Stef had only confounded him by being _both_ , at their first acquaintance. And Favinolieth was very...restrained - but it wasn't just their peculiar rapport that had piqued Van's suspicions. "I think there's some reason he had to get out of Rethwallen. Maybe his sister knows what he is. She was dead set on sending him out-Kingdom. I've no reason to think she knows about me -"

"You think Rethwallen doesn't have spies out gathering rumours? You haven't always been a shut-in vestal."

"Touche," Van muttered. "Anyway, Fath looks at me sometimes in a way that - well, it's not curiosity. Empathy is one of my Gifts," he added.

"Could've fooled me."

Van ignored that. "See if you can talk to him and let him know he's safe with you. Maybe be a bit decadent and scandalous." Percey rolled his eyes extravagantly; it was hardly a challenge for him. "I'd thank you _not_ to seduce him," Van added.

"Oh gods no. I've supped my fill of repressed country boys. Never again, I swore."

 

Van stared at a knothole in the door as if his will alone could speed Roal to his side. He tried to breathe slowly, to think, to measure. He heard a soft gasp from the bed. Stef had raised his head, breathing hard.

He crossed the room in an instant, and knelt to clasp his beloved's hands. He couldn't speak. Stef seemed to look straight through him, like a man lost in a fog close to home, but then his cloudy hazel eyes focused. The ghost of a smile danced in their depths. "I wasn't dreaming."

"No. I'm here," Van promised him. "I won't ask how you're feeling..."

"- because I'm not," Stef finished. He seemed so small, and pale as a down feather. And _frightened_ , as though he were unsure of what had happened, only that he wasn't safe. "Am I...?" He couldn't ask, and Vanyel couldn't answer. Van felt a pervading inanimation in him, as if the nerves in Stef's mind were as lifeless as charred wood.

Stef sat up slowly. Three layers of clothes shifted over his spare frame. His skin was drawn like paper, his eyes sunken and grim and vulnerable. He spent no more energy on facade; he was pared to bone, utterly himself, as if he intended his mere presence to impart an ugly truth that was meant for them alone. He smelt unfamiliar, ashen and saccharine. Van didn't know how to stay angry. _You damned fool, I love you._ Time closed back around him, viselike - he fought to breathe through his terror of loss. Stef's hands quivered between his own.

"You need to eat." Vanyel sprang to his feet, desperate for some tiny constructive thing to do. He was rarely helpless, and couldn't deal with it. He picked up the bowl that Percey had brought. Hard soldiers' bread, a precious handful of cherries. A meal of sorts - not too much to deal with. Van could smell fresh bread baking, somewhere downstairs, and that airy scent of birch smoke that would always and only mean Horn. All the work of feeding a city was happening. It was so slow, but there would be fresh bread in Horn soon.

Stef stared vacantly, and he reached for a cherry only to toy with it between his fingers. Van was a bare inch from snapping at him but he _couldn't_ now, and Stef looked up at him sharply. "Sorry. Keep thinking it's for someone else. Better saved for the younglings." He bit into the fruit, leaving half its flesh on the stone; it stained his fingers, running red down to his palm. "The younglings needed it more. I shared with them since Narwyn's baby died - that was after the grain ran out - she's only sixteen, and she stopped having milk for her baby..." He chewed down a mouthful of bread and Van watched him, struck silent by horror. Stef was dry-eyed. Vanyel's heart sank into his emptiness, the slow valley between his words. "I knew what to do." His voice held an uncanny certainty that Van had rarely heard from him before. "It wasn't easy - you know how hungry people take to anger. We had hundreds of hungry people - we had people die from hunger. I had to fight - always had to try - and never let them know I was trying aught. Percever and Ioun would get on edge, and I knew how to keep it all turning."

_You were the edge. Always._

"I knew what to make them do," Stef repeated. "I think I could make anyone dance, Van. _Anyone._ "

The deep chill spread through their bond, iciness reaching into his core. Where had all Stef's light gone? His _joy_ , the whole brightness and wonder and music of him? Was that only a brief interlude he played between bouts of this mechanical pauperism?

Van clutched at his own arms, twisting old scars. _If you'd even taken your share instead of_ less _, you might be fine. Percey's fine_ , and he hadn't a single charitable thought for the posturing buffoon. Van could have run from the room and choked him, except that wouldn't be a whit of help to Stef. He watched in agitation as Stef ponderously ate all the food on his plate, swallowing every last cherry pit.

"I can't feel you," Stef said, sounding lost again.

Van sighed. "You wouldn't want to. I wouldn't want you to."

"I would. I _do_. I missed you so much - I needed you so much," and he clasped Van's hand hard, til he could feel every knuckle through his spare grip, pleading for more of him, more than he had left, as if he who had wandered surefooted in the dark now stumbled at the first thread of twilight.

Van searched for some part of himself that he could offer - a scrap of strength and faith, a deep splinter of love that wasn't enmeshed with terror - and he wrapped his lover tight in his arms. "I have you. I won't lose you." _I can't._ It was like he held a man who'd just stopped running for the first time in days, too exhausted to think or speak or do aught but fight for his life-breath. The knotted paradoxes of him seemed to unweave in Vanyel's arms. Fragile, unbreakable. An avowed coward who'd proved his courage time and again. "I love you, please know that," Van whispered, stroking his dry and tangled hair.

Stef's breaths slowed, and Van felt his mind slip back into those slow, coin-edge rhythms; sleep could heal, or it could kill. He felt like he was exhaling the fear only to breathe it in again, a miasma caught between the bed-curtains. _Why would you throw everything away? You weren't Chosen. You haven't lost someone. You could make so much more music - you could see so much more of the world - have any lovers you wanted - why would you turn your back on all of that and head to war? No one asked you to fight here. No one asked you to drain yourself to dust._

He got to his feet, paced the tiny tower room again, teetering from anger to despair. How could Stef ever be safe with _this_ in him, waiting to emerge at the right disaster? _You do what you need to do. Whether you've the strength and the experience to do it, or not. And it changes you, every time - I've seen it. If you make it home alive, you'll never be the same - war doesn't leave a soul untouched._

If.

The door opened almost in his face. Roal leaned on the wall beside him, her silver-brown hair flapping free from a loose ribbon. "You called for me, Herald?" Behind her, Torrall pulled the door closed.

"Bard Stefen is burning out," Van said shortly, and he barely breathed as Roal knelt at Stef's side.

"This is Stefen the Pain-Soother?" she asked, and clasped Stef's limp hand. "What a way to finally meet him. He's down to bare roots," she muttered after a few moments. "You gave him food?"

"Percever found him a little bread and fruit."

"It's giving him strength, physically. But his energies," and Roal's fingers slipped behind Stef's ear. She cursed. " _How_ is he still burning energy with his channels in that state?"

"He's suppressing his own pain. It's a reflex." Stef's strongest instinct, strangling the rest. Desperation almost overcame him.

"I see," and her expression was one that Van would never wish to see on a Healer's face. "There was nothing but water and nettle leaves in him. That must be his first meal in days. And he's not really slept."

" _Slept?_ " Stef sometimes skipped meals if he wasn't reminded, but sleeping wasn't something he usually found hard. _Not like me..._ and everything came into focus and he felt _so_ tired he could barely draw breath. _That's_ Stef _making me feel so exhausted?_

"If he's in too much pain to rest, and if he's working this power by reflex every time he feels pain, it makes sense that he's not truly sleeping. Probably like this half the time - catatonic. And his channels aren't circulating his energy barely at all. It's like he's forgotten _how_ to sustain himself." Van's mind fell flat again, and he could only watch the searching lanterns of Roal's eyes. Torrall's face was flushed with guilt. "Maybe he's stabilising. He's burning energy but it's not eating any deeper into him right now," Roal observed, as if trying to find grains of hope.

"I'm sending him energy straight from a mage node under the citadel," Van explained.

"Are you sure that's safe?" 

The Healer's tone made it quite clear that she thought it was not. Van's panic climbed again. "I wouldn't usually do it, but Stef has an unusual link I can use that makes my filtered power compatible with his energy."

Roal frowned. "I can't see it. You'll have to show me the connection -"

"It's a deep line - hard to show you from outside," he explained, hoping Roal would get the hint, but she only frowned in perplexity, her fingers wandering the back of Stef's head. Gods, but Stef would have taken him to task if he'd been lucid. _You're_ dying _and I'm still resorting to euphemisms?_ "He's my lifebonded." Dismay swept over Roal's face. Dimly, he heard Torrall back away from him so fast he walked into the wall. "Energy I've attuned to myself is attuned to him as well - it's safe enough to - to try. And he's used to catching stray pieces of my mind."

Roal looked at him sadly - not in judgement, but with little hope. "I see. It will help if you can get him a buffer of energy to feed from while he heals. But his natural energy cycle still needs to be restored - his channels are worn too raw to fulfil their normal base functions right now. And you know I don't just mean the use of his Gifts."

Vanyel knew. He felt blankness settle over his face. He wanted to shout, to cry, and he couldn't. For the Gifted, there wasn't a division between one's energy and life itself; the two ran together, like the salt and water in the Northern Ocean. Starving, sleepless and with his channels close to destroyed, Stef was losing his ability to process the energy he needed to breathe and dream and live. Van had once come close to that precipice, blast-burned channels eating his will to live. Stef had _chosen_ to dance to the end of that line. 

"Can you help him?" he asked.

"I _could_ intervene and close off that energy process, but the pain would be tremendous. Quite possibly more than his body can bear right now. I can't give him a numbing draught when he's this physically weak - a thimbleful of argonel would kill him. But if it's _not_ stopped..." Roal's eyes told Van what path she'd seen ahead.

If the loop were to end, the pain alone could kill Stef. If the loop didn't end, Stef would die.

"Look, whatever else he needs, there's profound physical damage here too. If I've two knots in front of me and I can't untangle the one of them, I'm wont to work on the other. Sometimes that shows me a way into the first one. Come, Heralds, I'm half-spent." Roal extended both her hands, and Vanyel clasped one; if his hands were shaking, that couldn't be helped. Roal turned to Torrall, and Van averted his eyes. "Ever been part of a Healing meld, young man?" Evidently not. "I need your energy, not any Healing finesse, though it's helpful that Vanyel has a little of that. If I can repair the internal damage he incurred from undereating, that might help his energy cycle to begin again." Torrall took her right hand, and Van tried his very best to Sense nothing as the younger Herald reached for his left. The gentle grip, the quick squeeze of his knuckles, took him aback; a little attempt at comfort, when he was beyond it. "Vanyel, guide me." Roal was regarding him as if he were a half-tamed animal. "Touch him, sense your bond with him, and I'll do the rest."

She slipped her hand to the back of his, and pressed his palm down against Stef's shoulder. It felt more like the joint of a wooden doll than of a man, and Van fought back his despair and tried to focus on what Roal wanted him to do. He extended that second proprioception he possessed of Stef's body, as real and almost as immediate as his own - but numb with empty noise, as weak and cold as a banked fire. He felt Roal reach _through_ him - and then he couldn't think at all. He was only part of her wave of power, heedless of where he began, where he ended.

He was still in a daze when he felt Roal shake her hand free. Savil had once said she found Healing melds peaceful; something about them always left Vanyel feeling shaken. His hand was still curled around Stef's shoulder, and he looked up and saw Torrall looking at him with that curiosity Van always found grotesque, as if he were a particularly scintillating creature that the young man had found under a rock, at best to be pinned and displayed in a collection of peculiarities. _You never thought that I might be shaych; or maybe you never thought shaych people could lifebond, or even love each other? You never knew that Laynor's songs aren't about_ me _, or that Stef's_ are _?_

"That should get him physically settled," Roal said wearily. Van realised he and Torrall were still holding hands and he pulled away, feeling absurd. "Stay with him, and send for me if he deteriorates any further."

"Be honest with me," Van said - softly, but it was a demand. "Will he recover?"

Roal was silent for far too long, Vanyel's stomach dropping further with every second. "I've rarely seen burnout this bad, and I've never seen burnout coupled with near-starvation. And I've never seen anything like that power reflex loop," Roal told him. "Any one part of this would be hard, but all together? He's out of leeway - I don't know if his channels can heal naturally while his body's in this condition. He'd be losing ground fast if you weren't giving him energy, and his channels don't have _time_ to recover from the damage he's done to them. If it was just physical, he'd recover from the immediate malnutrition with a few weeks of care, but only if his energy cycle can normalise too." She looked unflinchingly into his eyes. She had known him too long to lie to him, or to give up. "I'm going to give it one more day to see if he starts a natural recovery, and then if not, I'll cut the pain numbing loop. That might make him bounce back."

_Or it might make him die in agony._

Van felt the cold dread he'd bottled up deep inside seep into his blood, his fingers. He couldn't stop shaking. _I didn't want to do this now. It's too soon, too far. I might not make it._ He felt like a cornered fox, with one bolthole left, knowing he'd be trapped for good if he ran. _I don't have a choice. I never, ever had a choice._


	6. Chapter 6

Vanyel rose to his feet and leaned against the door. He heard Roal's light step recede down the hallway from the little tower room. A hanging silence, as Torrall hesitated before he ponderously followed her. Alone again, he breathed his fear in and out, every inhalation turning to ice in his belly.

_I hate not having control. If I let Roal go through with her plan, I'd have to watch helplessly for hours while Stef was in pain, before we had any sign if it was saving him or killing him. And if I have to choose between inflicting pain on Stef or on myself..._

And he did have to choose. And soon - while Stef still had something left. And it wasn't a choice. He'd always, always been headed for this. He cast his eyes around the bare tower room. What might Stef need? His gittern rested in a recess in the wall, a tiny semblance of home. He couldn't part Stef from her. He picked through the clothing that Stef had left, as so often, in piles on the floor. Shirts and tunics torn halfway up for rags. Under one of them, he found a tiny bundle of paper, curled, precious - a letter he'd written in Rethwallen. Guarded and banal, and hidden like a treasure. Vanyel barely recognised his own words.

He felt the gentle Mindtouch a second before he heard the knock at the door. _:Come in,:_ he signalled, shoving his find deep into his pocket.

Tantras closed the door and leaned back against it, shaking his head as if pausing to think for the first time in hours. "Torrall said I'd find you here. And Stef." He carded a hand through dark, wind-knotted hair. "Is he alright?"

"I don't know." Van held himself rigid, keeping his feelings tight inside. 

"We just got a messenger back from Fath. Standoff at the border. No new demands yet."

Karse. Now there was a topic that made it safe to slip the leash on his rage. "For hells' sake, they've no place to demand _anything_."

"When has that ever stopped them?"

Van's face creased into a snarl, and he reached into the pack where he'd left that filthy proclamation. "True. Neither reason or force has ever dented their self righteous zealotry. Look, they made it absolutely clear what they want - Valdemar to be a crippled target for their predation - and we made it just as clear that just getting rid of _me_ won't accomplish that while we have allies and Mind-magic aplenty. So what in seven hells could they ask us for?"

"They're running scared, Van, and I don't think it's even of you. Can't say I blame them, the changes they've been through."

True enough. Karse had rapidly reorganised around their new Prophet, and not entirely without bloodshed. "You'd think they'd be busy building their glorious new religion -"

"When it could all go up in smoke in an instant?" Tran raised an eyebrow, and Van felt the abyss beyond his flippancy. Magic frightened Tantras, as it should anyone who'd seen magic used for war, _and it frightens me, alright? How can I tell anyone not to be frightened of me when I can barely cope with being me?_

_I should have solved this months ago. If I had, maybe..._ His eyes fell on Stef, the shallow rise and fall of his breathing. _I have to put this right. What if it's too late to put this right?_

He sat at the edge of the bed again, and slipped a hand about Stef's shoulder, feeling his warmth, his thread of energy. _He's not fading_ , Van told himself. It was hard to say any more than that. He felt Tantras watching him, and glanced up into his night-edged eyes. "Is there ought I can do?" Tran asked. Vanyel shook his head, and curled his hand in frustration. "That was a damnfool question, wasn't it?"

_Yes. Yes it was_ , and he leaned back into the pillows, drawing Stef close to him. He was so frighteningly light. "If he hadn't _been_ such a damned fool..."

"He's how old now?" asked Tran. 

"Twenty." Van stared down at his lover, irrationally angry. _He's barely lived yet. I'll be forty next year. I can't be alone again..._

"To think of the things I did when I was twenty. Or you," he added pointedly. Tran was probably alluding to that wizard he'd killed in Fenhallan. _That was different. I was a Herald-Mage, for Lady's sake! I_ wasn't _a damned Bard and I'd lost 'Lendel and it still hurt then and I'd so little else to lose. It all hurt. I didn't care if I came home or not._ "Lot of young people who want to help bite off more than they can chew - not the first time we've seen someone hurt themselves that way -"

"He shouldn't be here," snapped Van. "He should never, ever have been sent to the border -"

"He wanted to be here, didn't he?" Van hung his head. "Torrall told me what Stef said to him when he arrived - he knew exactly what he achieved, and once he pulls through he'll tell you how much it was worth it - just like you would. He won't thank you for hunting down whoever he armtwisted into it. Knowing your luck, it was one of our monarchs." All things Vanyel had already thought of - Tran could likely tell from his face. "And he held things together damned well. Can you imagine what we might have walked into if he _wasn't_ here?"

Van raised his eyes, poleaxing Tantras with hard, bastard pride. "Don't encourage him."

"Like I'd have to. A man that age wants to prove himself."

"Stef has nothing to prove," he protested.

"Randi's dead, Van. What does Stef have to do at the Palace when you're not home? Most Bards his age are Journeymen, out travelling the kingdom or beyond. There's only so long he could stay satisfied stuck home writing mushy songs. Especially when..."

Tantras trailed off but Van needled him malevolently. "When what?"

He shook his head. "It's not my business."

" _What_?"

"Be honest now. Did you give him any other way to reach you?"

Van's eyes narrowed. "You think this was some bid for my _attention_?"

"That is not what I said -"

"You think I was neglecting him. Was I? I was _trying_ to make it work. I was trying..." But could he honestly say he'd tried hard enough when it was always so much easier to push Stef away? _'Be honest,' Tran tells me. What, and admit my relationship with Stef is a tatter of what it used to be, because I'm wounded, and it took me so long to admit that to myself that it could be too late for us now? I kept myself busy all winter - with Jisa and Treven, with Taver, with the envoys, the Circle, the Council, and he always came back to me with his arms open and I'd fall in there exhausted then get so wound up and frightened he let me back away from loving him. He'd call me his best friend and we went entire weeks without touching. I kept my duties between us for months._

_I was so sure I'd left him right where I wanted him to be; back in Haven, safe, and probably in someone else's bed, and I told myself that was all I really wanted for him. And he decided it wasn't enough. He came here to fight with_ everything _he has, and maybe die, and I can't go on without him. I can't be alone again. No one else even knows._

_No one else._

He hung his head. "Maybe you're right. But - there's something I never told you." He looked up, steeling himself, and Tran's kindness faced him like a candle in a deep shaft of shadows, sharpening the darkness all around him. He readied each word before he said it, so that he couldn't back away. "When I was held captive in the north, I was tortured and raped. Stef helped me to recover," and he ploughed on even as Tantras stared at him in shock. "Aside from Taver and a couple of Healers, he's the only one who knows. He's been - very patient with me." He couldn't stand Tran's eyes any more and he closed his own, turning tight against Stef's sleeping form, his voice no longer working. _:You see now? He's the one thing that's kept me whole. If I had to face that pain and shame alone, I would be - dead inside at best. He wrote me letters last year that kept me from suicide. If he were gone -:_

"Gods, Van," Tantras breathed, and Van could feel the touch of his Empathy brushing at his shields, not flinching from what Vanyel had said. "He'll be alright, I swear it. You both will. Van -" and he hesitated, and Van turned to see his strong face crumpling in pain. "I'm sorry. I, I should have realised."

_:What, because you're a ThoughtSenser and an Empath?:_ he replied acidly. He kissed the top of his lover's head - Stef's hair was brittle and dry against his lips - and he sat up in the narrow bed. "You're not omniscient. None of us are," he muttered, and dared to look Tantras in the eye again, wary of pity.

He didn't find it. Tran nodded, and he held out his arms. It was only then that Van realised how desperately he had needed a friend's strength to lean upon. A friend who had some ghost of an idea how hard it was. He rose to his feet and dared open himself to that warm shaft of light that touched his mind. "Easy, Van. You've nothing to be ashamed of." Tran's voice wavered as they embraced. "I'm here for you, any time you need a shoulder."

"I know," he replied. "Gods, Tran. I'm not strong any more. I can't lose him. I've lost too much of what I ever had to rebuild from." His words were muffled against Tantras's shoulder.

"Van..." Tran swallowed hard. "That's not going to happen, is it?"

"I don't _know_ ," and he shook in Tran's arms as the shadow cut through him. "I don't know if it's too late. But I have to try. Maybe..." He looked up into Tran's worried eyes. _Gods, neither of us have a scrap of reassurance for the other._ "Look. Suppose we made an offer to Karse first."

Tran blinked, as if Karse had run away to another world. "An offer? Of what?"

"I need to not be here. That's the only way you'll make any progress. Stef and I can get out of the border region, and I'll pledge to never come back, _and_ never to set any spells here from afar. Provided they abide by their side of the agreement."

"Which would be?"

"Get creative." A grin found its way to Tantras's face, looking somewhat like it hadn't expected to be there. "I think they owe our monarchs and Lord Percever a great deal of recompense."

"Is it safe for Stef to travel?" Tran asked, and Van's pained expression was answer enough. "You want to Gate out of here?"

"There is nothing I want less," Van replied. "But I have to."

Tantras nodded. "In that case I should go join Favinolieth and handle the Karsites personally."

"Better you than me. Tell them I would sooner press our advantage than negotiate and I will need a lot of convincing to stay away," he suggested, and Tran's smile grew broad and incredulous. _It's what Stef would have told me to say._

"I should go. Delian and I can probably catch up to Favinolieth by nightfall," Tran said. "I guess I might not see you for a while."

"No." _I can't even know how long. It could take months to get back to Valdemar at all_ , and he thought of long, lonely days afoot in twisted wilderness. Let Tantras think he was in Haven, if that helped. He'd find out the truth in good time. "Tran - thank you."

"For...? Don't you dare," Tran shook his head. "Just take good care of the both of you. Til we meet again," and he gave Van an ironic bow, and smiled back at him with his usual implacable radiance as he closed the door.

 

Vanyel traced the sun-warm stone of the temple's arched doorway, trying to sense its heart, its meaning. The temple was as ancient as the city, rooted deep on the mountain bedrock, its belltower rising above him as high as the keep. _I'm not going to find a better terminus. And I can do this from outside without having to enter the sanctuary._ He had an inauspicious thought of the night years ago when Percever had tempted him there while the priests slept, insisting that Van come with him by candlelight to see the great idol of Kernos and the gold-threaded altar cloth. Vanyel prayed rarely and only beneath the stars, but that mattered little: Percey's intent had been thoroughly blasphemous. Exasperated with his posturing, Van had given up to debauchery up to a point - not on the altar - but he was wary of stepping under the eyes of the god within Horn's sanctuary again.

It didn't matter. He had nowhere else left to turn.

A glance back at Stef filled him with panic anew - had he time, had he strength yet? Stef looked so fragile that it seemed the gentle breeze could bow him like a bulrush reed; he huddled beside Taver, a warm cloak wrapped around him. Van could only hope there was still enough time to heal him.

Van opened the door; inside the temple, shafts of coloured light fell across the marble floors, over the shining altar, between Kernos's strong open arms, and Vanyel instinctively reached across the distance to a far-flung goddess. He leaned a hand against the stone, reaching into it, and he Felt a peculiar prickling response; he suspected the archway had been used as a Gate-terminus before. Above that faint tang of otherness, Van fancied he could feel the prayers of generations imprinted in the walls; if his own whispered entreaty went unanswered, perhaps the stone would still remember.

Even mages who tolerated Gates perfectly well often shared his horror of them. Gating might be convenient or, in some tight spots, a necessity, but to move through one was to cross beyond the comprehensible - it was a violation of Velgarth's natural distance and boundaries. Likely there were mages who'd used them carelessly, but not living ones.

He turned, and looked deep into Taver's eyes. _:Chosen, are you sure of this?:_ Van realised how hard he was breathing, and he leaned back against the stone to quiet his trembling.

_:No,:_ he admitted. _:I've never been able to trust Gates. And it's very, very far.:_ From all Van had read, it seemed no mage knew the absolute limit of a Gate, but if one were to name a reasonable upper bound as a number of miles, that number would likely be much smaller than the distance from Horn to k'Treva Vale. There was only one reason Van would dare this; he had long suspected, with much discomfort, that the distance didn't matter at all. The void was all the same, it all hurt the same, so why would it matter how far? But he wouldn't stake Taver's life on his dark fancies. _:It would better for you to stay here - you've every reason to, and I don't know how long I might be gone from Valdemar.:_

_:You aren't going without me,:_ Taver said.

It hurt to even frame his fear in words, even to Taver, who surely _knew_ \- he could hardly have avoided knowing. _:I'm not going solely for Stef. There's something wrong with my magic. There has been for months. I feel like I can barely hold a spell together any more. I need to ask Starwind and Moondance to - to help me. If I can even Gate that distance once, I can't promise I'll be able to Gate back again after.:_ The truth, cut one careful step at a time. He couldn't share what lay beyond that limit.

_:Van, where you go, I go. And where I go, Valdemar is.:_

Taver sounded so _certain,_ foundation-stone love set in his words. Van rested his mind against that feeling for a long moment, trying to figure out what he needed to do. _:It's not just the distance that's going to be hard for me. I hate Gating - I only do it when I haven't another option. I haven't done it at all since I bonded with Stef. And...:_ He swallowed hard.

_:I understand,:_ and Taver hesitated. _:Van, I was there that night too. I know what happened,:_ he reminded him.

Van stepped away. It was a cruel irony, and he wished Taver hadn't mentioned it. Taver and Lancir had stepped through that same Gate that had broken all his Gifts open, more than twenty years ago. _:Stef doesn't have a drop of Mage-potential - but I'm going to have to block him off_ completely _. He can't protect himself from that power the way you can. If I risked an open energy line between us...:_ He couldn't even finish the thought. _:So I won't be able to support him until we're on the other side and the Gate is down.:_ He felt energy trickle through their lifebond, and the thought of blocking that link filled him with panic. _Once we get there, there'll be other people to help him_ , Van told himself firmly. Stef was at least half-asleep. He'd made it down the stairs and through the winding streets to the temple without fainting again - Van had huddled him under a cloak and sternly brushed aside the well-wishers, and it was fortunate that the people of Horn were more interested in breadmaking and foraging right now than piety. Stef seemed so fatigued by the short walk that he could have barely taken another step. _:Could you - watch him, warn me if something's wrong?:_

_:Of course.:_

Van felt Taver's sympathy and his fierce compassion, a ring of light that circled Stef just as much as it did Vanyel himself. He was surprised, and then ashamed - he ought to _know_ by now that Taver cared for him so much as a _person_ that his loved ones, his family, the one who was more than family, had fallen under his care as well. _I can barely live up to the office of Monarchs' Own, and I forget our bond means more to him than that - as if he could treat me as just an office-holder any more than I could treat him as a horse._

_:Thank you. I love you.:_ He'd rarely said it so plainly, and Taver Sent him a burst of pure affection, and snuffled warm against his hair. _:I wish I didn't have to do this,:_ he admitted. Sometimes he'd found it hard to admit his weaknesses to Taver, but not now. _:Gate-energy really hurts me. Afterwards I'm going to be...not much good to anyone. I'll be tired. I won't really be myself. Maybe not for days. I'm sorry,:_ and he tried to impress the apology as deep as he could because he knew when the time came that he most needed to make it, he wouldn't have the strength. If they made it there at all. Taver couldn't help him with that part - it could only be Van's own thoughts, his own personal energy that bridged the void. He had as much power in his reserves as he ever would, drawn to the brim from the node, even while letting a line flow through him to Stef. _:I'll find the way. But if the pain tears my mind apart, I'll need you to get Stef through if you can.:_ Most likely, if the Gate proved beyond his strength, Vanyel would die too fast to know about it.

He reached for Stef's shoulder, and nudged him to alertness. "I'm almost ready now." He pressed Taver's reins into Stef's hand. "He'll lead you once it's time. Just follow him. Don't worry about me." Barely awake and barely lucid, panic flashed through Stef's eyes. Van already felt himself withdrawing from all they shared, shielding Stef out for all he was worth, and it left him feeling cold and strange inside.

Four years since he'd last built a Gate. He wasn't the same person. His world had turned upside down since that time he'd gone to ask Starwind and Moondance's advice on changing the Heraldic web. It was hard to imagine seeing them again. _The last time I Gated was before I even met Stef. Before Savil died. Before Jisa was married. Before she and Treven were crowned._ The past felt like so many crumbs, like nothing.

Perversely, Van was good at making Gates for the same reason he hated them so much; every step was etched in pain in the deepest foundations of his magic. He brushed his hand to one side of the door, then the other, knowing this place and all it meant to him, holding it steady in his mind, raising the power, bracing himself against the pain.

It was no good. It cut straight through his mind, stealing all his thoughts and every point of reference. He desperately clung to the image of the end of his journey - k'Treva Vale, dark stone and calm water and a rich, green carpet of life, and his friends, his wing-kindred - his power reached for them, strained, crossed the void like a needle in the dark. It was so far, so long ago, and it hurt _so_ much - but it was there, as if juggled at the tip of his fingers, almost to drop and to shatter forever. The power leapt from him, tearing at his channels as it stopped being _his_ and became one with the void. He grasped it, pulling with all his might, then clinging tight as it moved him - clinging to Horn and damned stupid Percey and the birch smoke in clear mountain air. Kernos' arms spread like trees against the starlight. It was all together. It was close to destroying him.

"Go," he begged, blinded and disoriented by that aberrant touch of matter against matter. "Quickly." He couldn't speak any more. _:Just get through, and I can take it down.:_

_:Van?:_ He felt Taver's nose on his neck. He hadn't even heard his steps. There was nothing but the pounding ringing lights darkness in his head. _:Are you sure this is right?:_

He brushed off Taver's concern with the last bit of ruthlessness he had left. _:I'm sure, now go.:_ He had _no other choice_ , and he stepped through the Gate after them, into the soul-scraping pain that he hadn't faced since before -

\- before Leareth tore his life apart.

It was still the same void. The same pain. All pain was the same pain.

 

All pain was the same pain.

He could join two far-off points together in a Gate because in the void, all places were the same. There was no distance, nor time, no north nor south - the void touched everywhere equally. The oldest wounds were as newly-cut. The oldest nightmares still dreamed and whispered.

Half a step, and Horn seemed impossibly far from his mind. Van buckled from the effort of holding on to the temple door - just for one more step - because if he faltered, if he let that sense of Horn and all it had ever meant to him collapse, or if he forgot all he knew of k'Treva Vale, the Gate would fail and he'd be trapped in the void where nothing marked a path to anywhere.

He reached forward numbly, only emptiness ahead of him. Stef had gone through - and Taver - and soon he'd see Moondance, Starwind, Brightstar - soon - but the void had no future. He reached toward his memory of the lush and loving Vale and it shrank from the pain in his touch.

_I forgot how hard it is to hold on - it's been so long - not since -_ and in the dark and the pain he remembered nothing else that had passed in his life _\- since before Leareth._

The void had no past.

Years nor leagues brought any distance from the pain. There was no before Leareth.

_'Surrender.'_

Vanyel was fifteen again, ice creeping up his spine. Darkness staring into him.

_'Vanyel. You surrendered in my arms come the end. Why bother with this nonsense? Surrender now, and you will never know loss. You will never have aught to lose. You will never have to hurt, Vanyel.'_

Van felt every word like a blow to the head, battering him further from the thought of his destination. There was no after Leareth. 

_'Surrender here, and I will never have to hurt you.'_

He felt every loss, every wound tearing him apart - saw anew a body torn open by mechanical claws - a body mutilated and bleeding in the snow - a mind broken and falling from the tower, hitting the earth - _'Spare yourself all this pain. You are quite alone here. Always alone with me.'_

Ice down his back and splitting him open from the inside, on his knees, bound in agony twixt mountain and vale, violating his senses again and again. Numbness at his edges. Van lashed out with the last of his power, and his focus faltered - he was losing where he had come from. Always and only the void. There was no after Leareth.

_'I am always here with you. Surrender.'_ The word pressed itself against his lips, forcing Vanyel to taste it, to breathe it in where he was. To remember what he had done in the dark in Leareth's bed. Ice sliding all the way into him, whispering his complicity. _'You allowed me to, you allowed me you allowed me'_ and the weak flailing of his empty power did nothing. He was just another conduit for darkness, kept alive only by a rage that was near exhausted. He felt the last of it go, lost to the void. There was only pain left. He ached to say farewell, but knew not to whom. He was always alone. Always with Leareth, Leareth inside him, taking him, making him alone.

A white shadow rose up in his vision and he heard his shirt tear between snapped teeth. _:Vanyel. Stop dreaming. He's dead and gone. You have to move.:_ Taver dragged him half a step and daylight opened over him.

 

He felt like his very essence had been scraped away from him. The Gate lingered in his core, transfixing him with pain. Taver's blue eyes bored into his. _:Van. You had a flashback - a nightmare - inside the Gate. Are you with me now?:_

He wasn't, really. Kneeling on stone and feeling like nothing meant anything. The warm and the living had gone from him, leaving only his wrongness, his corrupted wounds.

_:Van, where are we?:_

Vanyel stared around, from tree to rock to archway, a man resting, the shape of a white horse, and felt like he saw nothing at all. He curled in on himself, closing his eyes against the light. If he curled up tight enough for long enough, perhaps the pain would go away.


	7. Chapter 7

Vanyel was roused from his fugue by a deep, guttural howl that was fit to cut the wind in two. It spoke through all his lostness, calling urgently to his last dormant instinct. _Someone needs me._ His mind feel like thick water full of debris; it sloshed and scratched against his skull. He rolled to his feet, gasping as if he might drown in it. He assessed his whole surroundings in a moment. 

This wasn't what it should be. 

He was exactly where he meant to be. He knew this shallow cave, the archway that led out of it - this ring of stones - but beyond that, his eyes became lost in desolate undergrowth.

Stef was atop a rock nearby. He crouched like a rangy wolf, shirt rolled up past thin elbows and straggly hair tangled around his face. The rock's shape was familiar, and its carvings made it look oddly tame - marked out as human territory. Tayledras territory.

Nothing else here looked as if it had ever been touched by human hands. 

Van looked up the sheer-walled canyon. In his memory it was wider, huge enough to hold a whole world of magic and music and love. Nature softened its walls - roots opening rock, faces overrun with ferns. A dingy trickle where he expected an elegant waterfall. The great king tree at the canyon's centre was overrun by knotweed. Just in front of them, he saw vines running into a deep, cracked hollow in the stone. He knelt, and reached his hand down to feel the curve of rock. He remembered the water, drawn by magic from the deep warm earth. He remembered four years ago, how Moondance had dropped him fully clothed in the pool to soothe his Gate-addled senses. 

He turned back to the inviolate stone archway. It had no capstone; like the pool, it was carved from bedrock by magic. The vines and grasses that crept over the stones seemed to twist and fracture before they could reach it. Unnatural things happened near stone that touched the void.

Taver paced the shallow cave behind the arch, his feet striking rhythmically on the stone. The strange cry seemed not to have alarmed him. _:We walked up to the tree, then came back. Stef saw the entrance to some other abandoned caves, and there's more trees, that don't seem... Van, where are we?:_

Stef stared down at him, not even asking. The wolf was in his eyes, wild beyond questions, beyond fear. "Sorry. Kyree distress call. Hyrryl taught me." He shifted, pulling his cloak tight around him. "Thought was worth a try. Being as we haven't found any humans around." The air hung warm and stiflingly humid, and sun cut bright shadows through the foliage above them, yet Stef shivered. "This isn't right, is it? Where's Starwind and Moondance and their people?"

Van hadn't even thought about this possibility while he was building the Gate. "They've moved k'Treva Vale."

"What?"

"They're nomadic - they cleanse the land around them, then - then they move on." Van curled his fist against the thankless stone, furious with himself. "I should have guessed."

Stef made a small, empty noise in his throat, and he raised his eyes toward the daylight. "So - can you find where they've gone?"

"I don't know." There was a tool they'd given him for this - a talisman - and it was securely in a drawer in his room in Haven. He could not possibly have been any angrier with himself.

That sound again, some vacant cousin of laughter. "This wasn't on the list of places I expected to die."

"Stef!" Van felt himself teetering into that empty despair, tumbling past those torn-off dead ends in his beloved's memory - a filthy alleyway, a rickety carriage with a red-cloaked stranger, a snowbank high above the Ice Wall, a song sung between Horn's tight walls. A half-dozen times he'd lost all hope of survival. He had _never_ felt this from Stef. It shocked him cold. He hadn't imagined a Stef who could give up - Stef was his optimist, his scrappy luck-hunter. They had come together _because_ Stef couldn't stop hoping.

 _I'm not giving up on you. I've been in worse places. No one's trying to hunt me down and kill me. There's probably someone within a few miles that can help us. I'm not physically injured. I can do_ something _, even while I'm still too drained to use my Gifts._ With magic, he could have found the nearest Tayledras mage in moments. But even trying to reach past his own eyebrows left him dizzy and nauseous. He stretched for where the valley node had been - but it was drained, dispersed all around into little rivulets, different and disorienting. He couldn't use them. "Stef," he said. "I know the lay of the land - if I can find some sign of them..."

Stef sniffed, and he shivered convulsively, clutching his arms around his knees. "They're gone," he muttered. "Gone, gone -"

"They won't be far." Stef didn't respond, only stared up at the archway with lost eyes. An orange shaft of sun fell upon his pale, sunken face. Van froze. "How long was I out for? How long have we been here?"

Stef blinked slowly, as if he didn't understand such things any more. _:A few candlemarks,:_ said Taver, and Van ran across the stone, grabbing Stef's cold hands in his. Trying to find him. Shaking for the last drop of water in an empty skin. Van clutched his hands, searched for anything in himself that could sustain him. _:Chosen!:_

He Felt Taver's energy run through him, and he directed it into Stef's emptiness. A white cloth stained red by a seeping wound. "Oh thank you, thank you," he breathed. "Taver - can you - I have to try to find where they've gone - if I can't -"

"Gone, gone, gone, gone, ne'er to be seen again," Stef's macabre lullaby echoed through the lost vale

Van clapped his hands to his ears. He hadn't the strength to close Stef out any more. He hurt, and it was like trying to push water uphill. _:Chosen, go. I won't let him fade away from you. Find them.:_

Van looked up into Taver's eyes, saw the fire and the promises there. _He wouldn't lie to me_ , but the best he knew was that Taver would _try_ as hard as he could to keep Stef alive. He'd give whatever he had to. Because he loved what Van loved, needed what he needed.

He grabbed his swordbelt from where it hung on Taver's flank, and he buckled it over himself as he stumbled through the wild undergrowth toward the vast tree, feet catching in briars at each step. He had no idea where he was going. What was he looking for? The tree's great limbs looked hollow, like burst waterskins. People had lived there - his friends - his siblings.

Where would they leave a sign? _Would_ they? Surely there would be something for their occasional passers, the other peoples they traded with, the ranging kyree or dyheli migrants, the Shin'a'in? Their new vale would be well hid, even as they ripped the mask from this old home and called in the weeds and vermin. An insect brushed against his hand. It was swelteringly warm, even in the shadow of the great tree. He traced old paths in his mind, along the earth, from tree limb to bridge to ladder. From Moondance's home below to Snowlight's above - and beyond, he saw a sister-tree fallen at the southern tip of the vale, its great roots open to the sky. The first place he'd ever slept above earth, with a long-ago lover. The vale seemed so small, its winding spaces all overrun.

He tore his eyes away from the sky, and scanned the rough ground below the king tree. The earth was thickly shaded there, empty but for a little grass and lichen. A fox's den between the roots. A warning screech from some small creature, disturbed by his booted feet. There a wider gap, an overgrown step - a path below. He forced his way past a falling curtain of vines and ran down the stairs below the earth, not even daring a magelight. He spiralled down until the daylight was out of reach, feeling ahead with each step, until the back of his knuckles hit a solid wall.

He laid his face against the flat stone. Listening to nothing. Seeing nothing. 

He collected himself quickly, because he hadn't _time_. This had been the heartstone chamber, and it was buried. He should have worried if it hadn't been. Maybe some of the rest of the maze of chambers and work rooms under the vale were still open. He climbed back up the dark staircase on his hands, and looked for another path, picking his way through the wild land outside the tree's shadow. He felt tall grasses stirring, swatted away the insects that stirred around him. A sapling swayed. How long had the Vale been deserted? This looked like years of overgrowth, a ruin from a bygone people. The mages must have forced some of this before leaving. If he'd had half his senses, would he have felt Moondance's work in the earth? Would he have sensed Brightstar's power?

That anguished howl cut the air again, the whole cut of the Vale its soundbox, and Van glared back toward Stef in frustration. He was trying to _think -_

_:Van - he saw something -:_

_:Where?:_ Van spun, a hand to his eyes, no idea what to look for when everything looked so wild and wrong. His eyes blurred. _:Is he hallucinating -?:_

_:There's something under the tree -:_

Van dropped to a crouch, looking. The king tree's roots rippled and shimmered. 

_Ay'gretshk._

Its skin flushed as it moved, a rainbow-shine rising as it absorbed the earth's latent power. Soul eater. 

There were creatures that had been Changed by Pelagir magic, or warped to survive amid its ravages, and then there were soul eaters. They ate and drank it, preying on other predators that had adapted to use magic. Preying on mages. It was eyeless, dirt stuck in its ring of silver teeth as it tasted the earth for the steps of its quarry.

Van had seen one only once before - last time, a Tayledras scout killed it before it could get near him. You couldn't fight an _ay'gretshk_ with magic - it lived on magic. Alive, it was repulsive - slithering on its trunk like a snake, the four divided coils of its tails flickering greedily over the tainted earth. If he could find where it started and where it began, it might have been twice his length.

He stood so still he hardly dared to breathe. _:Stay in the cave,:_ he implored Taver. _:Get Stef in there. It eats the Gifted and magical beasts. I don't know if it's scented us. If it comes near Stef...:_ He couldn't say it.

He couldn't ask it and Taver would never make him. _:I won't let it get near him.:_

Vanyel drew his sword, slow and almost silent. Would that he had a bow. He didn't know what it might do to him up close. He edged nearer, picking through the knee-deep grass with his sword held at guard. How to read something without eyes? The soul eater moved with deceptive grace, sliding nimbly over the rough ground, seeming to taste each piece of deadwood or loose stone with its rainbow of tails before moving on to the next. Had it sensed him at all? _Maybe there's not enough left of me to sense -_ and when it roiled toward him, he barely struck his sword down in time.

One translucent coil lashed toward him and Van's sword grazed it as he leapt clear. Dark purple blood sprayed over the earth. He fell back into the underbrush, feeling his foot caught - feeling its whole bulk tug at him - and he waved his sword at the earth near his own foot. Nothing. The ground raked his skin, and he felt his foot growing numb, felt a wet jaw about his ankle - 

He heard a _thud_ , and it disconnected. And another. The second time, he saw the cast stone strike its yawning mouth, saw blood and silver needle-teeth flying. It reared up, leaving Van reeling, and a white slash cut the air between them in two.

Relief almost stole his breath away. The white bird came up from its stoop dripping with dark blood, and it was so close that Van could be sure. A Tayledras bondbird - a great owl. And far beyond, he glimpsed the silhouette of a man lying against a bough of the tree, white hair hanging down like a trail of flowering ivy.

 _:Brightstar,:_ he Sent, and in return he felt a wave of shock joy. _:You're not hidden enough,:_ he snapped. For if he would make a nice snack for the soul-eater, Brightstar would be a feast.

 _:I'm not trying to hide,:_ Brightstar replied, and his mindvoice was playful as the beast turned to face him. He rose to a crouch on the tree-limb, and waved his hand. _:Again, Tawu!:_

The beast screeched under the owl's talons. Vanyel saw blood run from its head, and it writhed away - a shallow scratch, but it sagged back miserably as the owl spread his wings wide. Its bloodied head sank, and its extrusions all coiled together, churning the earth beneath the heart-tree.

 _:They're not brave,:_ Brightstar explained. _:They seek weak or lonely prey. They don't like trouble.:_

In moments its head was gone below the earth. Vanyel breathed, not raising his eyes until every inch of it had burrowed away. He felt Tawu's shadow cross him. Brightstar dropped from branch to branch with his hands until he met the earth. 

He'd grown tall, easily Starwind's height, and in the heat of the summer day he wore only light green breeches, a hawking glove that ran up to a strap over his shoulder, and an elaborate necklace, blue beads bright against the golden skin of his chest. The owl swooped down to meet him, flapping his wings wide as he alighted on Brightstar's raised arm. _Inherited all my gifts,_ and _knows how to make an entrance._ Van hadn't the strength to roll his eyes; his every nerve felt pulled tight and he could barely hold them together.

"Father," Brightstar called in Valdemaran, for so he would always greet Vanyel, source of his foreign, stranger blood; _gift-born_ as the Tayledras said. "Did you come without our talisman? It's a good thing I woke, though Tawu won't forgive it." The bird glared at Vanyel, twitching one eartuft in agitation. _Nocturnal_ , he thought dumbly. No longer a boy tied to lessons or his parents' routines, Brightstar would keep the hours that best suited his bondbird. "I sensed a Gate open on our old land, and my father told me not to worry over it unless trouble came to us - you know how he is, he always wants to let things be! But I had to see for myself, and night seemed too long to wait." He broke off abruptly, narrowing his silver eyes at Taver. "I do not know you."

 _:He doesn't mean to be rude,:_ Van told his Companion. The Tayledras language had no form of greeting for strangers. Van would have to explain what had befallen him, why Taver was here, and not just to Brightstar but to his fathers and all the rest of the clan. _I've naught good to bring them, only tragedies and burdens._

 _:It's alright,:_ said Taver, and Van wondered how many times he'd endured such awkward introductions.

Brightstar's mind was already elsewhere. "I think the _ay'gretshk_ was hunting a wounded _kyree_ \- I heard their warning-call and ran here, but Tawu saw no _kyree_ -"

"That was Stef - he's a Bard - his mind's burning out. We came here because he needs healing," Van felt his voice rising in panic. Tawu circled above the cave with a hunter's eye; but his human bondmate was a healer, not a killer. Brightstar clasped Vanyel briefly, brushing his lips against his father's forehead, and he ran down to Stef's side.

Stef's knees were clutched to his chest. He seemed barely awake - he looked from Brightstar's face to Vanyel's without expression, and he didn't react as Brightstar laid a hand over his brow.

"I was trying to take him to Moondance while - while he had time," and even as Van spoke he felt that time slip away, spilt over miles or years. If he'd come to the right place - or if K'Treva Vale hadn't travelled - or if Moondance had come himself... 

"He is but an ember," the young Healer-Adept said. Van had never seen Brightstar look so severe - _and it's my fault, I let this happen to my own lover..._ Brightstar shrugged off his glove and knelt, touching Stef at both temples. Van hung back, and he felt Taver step close behind him. He felt shadow enclose him. He could barely, barely feel Stef any more. He didn't hope to escape from loneliness again - stranger to think he could ever have anything to hold, anyone who he wouldn't send to their death or drive away.

_:You aren't alone.:_

He looked into Taver's eyes, blue stone flecked by centuries of storms and footfalls. It was more of him than Van had ever seen before, and he rested on that strength, bare inches from tears, feeling memories of a dozen lost bonds slipping past the place where Taver held his heart inside. There was no solace there. He would lose Van one day too. Knowing didn't help. It had never, ever helped. Yet somehow his love had never been futile.

Brightstar muttered quietly to himself. He raised his head, his eyes still closed. "What a strange Gift. He has hidden the pain that would have been his ally. Pain is a warning." He breathed slowly, and Vanyel felt his mind slip into entrancement. He could sense Brightstar's energies intersecting Stef's; he watched how they flowed, where they went. "Here," his son murmured - and overlaying the weak remnant of Stef's life-thread, Brightstar's power bloomed in perfect synchrony.

Brightstar didn't move. Van turned to Taver, not quite willing to believe it. _:Is he - do you see - ?:_

 _:Yes.:_ Taver's flanks heaved with relief.

No Valdemaran healer had taken less than several months to learn what Stef did. Brightstar watched Stef's energy with a Healer-Adept's eye, moved as one with it and all at once he had replaced it with his own. "Rest your mind," he murmured, and Van wasn't sure who he spoke to. He was deep in his trance, energy wrapping around the thin edges of Stef's, enclosing his flickering spirit.

It was as sudden as feeling a shutter close on a cold night. The weak flame turned steady, building with Brightstar's every slow breath. Van curled a shaking hand in Taver's mane. Brightstar _wouldn't_ let Stef go. Stef would live through another sundown and every second felt more precious than Van had ever known. He was close to delirium. Nothing else mattered, no troubles, no wounds or nightmares. Only watching Stef breathe without pain, without diminishing.

He could barely feel time passing; he knelt, and clasped Stef gently in his arms, as if his fragile bones might shatter at his touch. Van breathed around a lump in his throat. He tried to think clearly, but all his thoughts seemed determined to wander untrammelled. Tawu had fallen asleep on a nearby sapling, his head below his hunched wing. 

Brightstar stirred, blinking his eyes against the sunlight. He was quiet for several more moments, collecting himself. "I have done what I can do here. He will not wither, and time will do him well now." He exhaled hard, shaking his head, and he threw an arm over Vanyel's shoulders, weary and exaultant from the Gift that moved through him. "What a frightening wound. He is your _shay'kreth'ashke_ ," he noted. Like Moondance, Brightstar was wont to see the unseeable. "Then I think we are in balance." Brightstar lifted his chin, a flash of pride in his silver eyes.

It took Van a moment to understand what he meant, because it was so absurd. _Gods, Tran was right about ridiculous young men. He thinks he's proving himself - trading life for life._ Van wanted to say that Brightstar had never owed him anything - but that wasn't what the youngling wanted, was it? _He wants me to accept it and know him as a man now._

"Then I am destined to go into your debt, for we need shelter," Van replied. "How far is the Vale?"

Brightstar waved his hand, dismissive of Van's concerns. "You are k'Treva, though you forget it. Home's not far - we'll be back by nightfall." He looked up at Taver. "You carry both of them?" he asked, in stilted Valdemaran.

Taver nodded, and Van looked to him with gratitude. _:Stef's earned that of me,:_ Taver told him. _:And he's little burden.:_

"Then I hope you keep pace with a man on foot. May I know you? I am Brightstar k'Treva." Brightstar reached his arms out to Taver, determined to mimic the Valdemaran politeness though Taver could hardly return the gesture.

"He is Taver," Van said, gathering Stef in his arms. The Companion knelt where the edge of the overgrown land met the bare stone of the terminus. He looked up to Brighstar with warm blue eyes. "He bonded with me after Yfandes died."

Brightstar brought his hands to a clasp over his heart. "When I saw you, I feared as much," he told Taver. Fandes had adored Brightstar, and been adored by him in return. "I wish I did not greet you as a tiding of sorrow. I hope to be your friend and your brother in time."

"He hopes so too," Van told him. Brightstar's eyes reminded him of those awful first days back in Haven as a Herald trainee - how Savil's friends had looked at him with curious pity, seeing him in someone else's place. It hurt. The Tayledras said death became new life in the cycle of the stars, but it was all just hurt and talking about it was unbearable, and he had to. "There's a lot I should tell you." He settled into the saddle, Stef slumped in his grip. Tawu fluttered, indignant at the sun. 

"Then tell. We have some hours to walk." 

It would be a slow ride til sundown.

 

The stars were out when they reached the Vale, and Tawu swooped away into the empty sky above them. One step within the shadowed Vale, and Van knew it for a home, abundant with a life that had been scraped bare from the abandoned place where his son had found them. Above, the trees were radiant with magelights, shining through the laced, opaque panes of the ekeles, and by their light he could see the intricate paths of the Vale marked out among the verdance. It was as if the whole were one vast garden cast into stark, deep shadows; flat blues and black, interspersed by bright flashes of flowers. He breathed their heady scent, and here and there a breath of crushed herbs, a thread of fire below. Over the thrum of a waterfall, he heard nightbirds and muffled voices, human and hertasi. The whistling song of a reed flute. He felt so far from it all, as if his feet still wandered those distant, battle-scarred mountains. Magic wove below and around him, flowing and working within the deep earth, and he shied from its touch. But Stef rested warm in his arms and he was home.

In the deep shadow beneath the king tree, Starwind and Moondance waited for them.

For hours, Van's feeble heart had quailed at the thought of coming to them bearing such catastrophic failures. His one relief was that he didn't have to tell them that Savil was dead - Brightstar had delivered the blow for him, hours ago, in a Sending Van hadn't the strength to join him in.

All his guilt, his fear of facing them, evaporated at the sight of Moondance's upturned face. Van wanted to run to him, but he couldn't - Taver knelt, and he waited, aflood with emotions he couldn't keep at bay any more, as Brightstar lifted Stef from him - safe after all they'd been through, and he ached as Brightstar silently carried his lover down the stairs beneath the tree. _He won't be out of my sight for long._

He stepped from Taver's back, and Moondance embraced him. "Vanyel. _Zhai'hell'eva_ ," Moondance whispered; Starwind, too, clasped him briefly, then pulled away to clutch at his own arms. Van reached for his mind, and felt the cold barrier of Starwind's solitude.

Moondance's hand at his shoulder stilled him, and Van watched as something passed between the two of them, silent and formless, before Starwind walked away. Van felt hurt again, and knew he had no right. He had never seen Starwind distraught before. There went another of his illusions, and without it Vanyel felt bare as a tree in winter. The storm in Starwind's eyes had torn him open, baring all his wounds against the elements. He'd only known Starwind's emotions as subtle and calm, even in grief; now he radiated despair, and futility, and it shook everything that Van knew of the world.

Starwind vanished up the steep stairs that were cut into the king tree; Moondance held Van at his elbow, and guided him down into the chambers below, with slow steps and little musical sounds from his lips that Van was too weary to interpret. He knew, selfishly, that he ought to be the one providing comfort right now. Beneath the stairs, Moondance fell elegantly onto a strewn patch of cushions; Van sagged beside him, not even sure how he would ever move another step, let alone push on with his intentions. He'd come here with so much to ask of Starwind and he couldn't. He'd been a self-centred fool and never considered what grief he'd be bringing them. _I was fighting so hard just to get here, as if I could assume someone else would pick up my burdens as soon as I crossed their threshold. As if it would only be my sacrifice._

Moondance leaned his face on Vanyel's arm, and Van avoided his searching eyes. _My grand problems can wait. Stef will live, and that's all I really need tonight. I've shared all the news I most dreaded sharing. I'm not alone._ Everything else still ached, and Moondance's breath moved gently over the back of his hand.

"Starwind needs you," he said awkwardly. This was their time of grief, but his own stirred and tore at him anew. Starwind shared his inner feelings with few; Savil had been one of them. And he thought of what he'd seen in Starwind's eyes and wondered - at his age, and with the lives Tayledras lived - how many more were left save for his _shay'kreth'ashke_.

Moondance shrugged. "In time he will, but he needs to be alone more right now. In that regard, we differ." He looked up at Vanyel with tired, lonely eyes.

 _Moondance needs me._ And he didn't feel like good support, but for Moondance, he had to try. Maybe all he had to do was be there.

Moondance turned onto his stomach, and rested his head on one cupped hand. He didn't look at Vanyel, but Van sensed his regard, like a shoot growing in some dark place and trying to seek daylight. _Starwind wants to be alone and Moondance doesn't. And I'm little help to either of them._

"I'm so sorry," he tried. "It's been so long I - I'm sorry to be only telling you now."

"Better that we know," Moondance said sadly. "I could have hoped all my days to see her again, and never to say farewell and make the honours. She gave me my life again," he whispered. Tears rolled silently down his cheeks. Van reached for his hand, and felt everything shake - and hurt again, as if Savil had only just left the room, her voice still fading from the air, and there with Moondance's hand warm against his, he didn't hear her imploring him to check his wards - no - he heard her refusing to make a home in the Vale.

"Mine too," was all he could say. 

Moondance lifted his hand, stared at it strangely. "Vanyel, you are worn to nothing."

"I just need a little rest," Van shook his head. "Please, dear friend, don't worry for me - you've your own wounds to care for tonight."

"And I do so by tending to others. You know that," Moondance sighed. "You are not so less drained than Stefen," he exclaimed. "Why do you not touch our Vale node?" The bright gathering of energy loomed in his consciousness, suffusing the earth below him with its inviting warmth. His mind lurched with hunger. _No._ He couldn't, wasn't going to stray from his path now.

"I can't - I need to ask Starwind to, to," and all his intentions felt like dust in that passing whirlwind. But Moondance's eyes implored him to at least tell him what he'd meant. "I'm not in control any more. Ever since that winter, I've been failing - I can't trust myself with magic. I've made mistake after mistake and it's not going to stop. I almost lost my mind Gating here. I have to ask Starwind to contain my power."

Moondance looked at him in shock. "Why would you ask such a thing? What happened to you?"

His hand felt limp in Moondance's grip. He couldn't expect mercy for this. "I attacked Stef while I slept beside him. If that were to happen again - I couldn't live with myself."

"You harmed your lifebonded?" Moondance gasped.

"I _lost control_ ," he said, utterly humiliated. He should never have indulged himself in Stef's company - and to risk something so precious, all because he was wracked by selfish, indecent wants... He felt tainted from the inside, as if Leareth had taken all his faith and replaced it with poison. "I had a nightmare that Leareth - Savil's killer - I dreamed he was there and I tried to attack him. Stef could have _died_ at my hands -"

"Stef was injured, then?" asked Moondance. "You must show me his wounds, that I might heal him."

"No -" _Why won't you understand?_ Moondance stared up at him intentely, as if taking measure of his soul. "I woke up. I held back the power. I _barely_ didn't harm him."

"You held back the power? But you said you _lost_ control." Moondance replied. "It seems you have very fine control, _shayana_ , even at your worst. There is no shame in having weaknesses, and it takes skill and courage to keep others from being harmed by them. You do well at this. I see no need to contain your magic."

Vanyel shook. Then how could he keep being _near_ Stefen? "But -"

"Why would you want this? It is not your power that betrays you. Power is only power," said Moondance. "It is something in your mind that you distrust, no?" Vanyel flinched from him. Moondance dropped his hand. "Wingbrother, what has befallen you, that you expect harm even from a healer? You do not have to speak of it," he added. "But would you allow yourself to bare that wound to me?"

_Why won't you contain me? That would be ten times easier._

He curled in on himself. He knew Moondance couldn't reach him, couldn't _touch_ him, without seeing everything he was ashamed of. Everything foul he'd done and was. The gentle, blue breeze of Moondance's perception stirred his mind - and fell as flat as the lull before thunder.

_I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry_

The air stirred at the back of his neck. "Come with me," Moondance commanded, and the litanies of shame pressed in on him til he could barely breathe, barely think.


	8. Chapter 8

Vanyel knew when he awoke that he was not alone, and he viciously wished that he was. His shame felt like a black scab. For a moment, he couldn't quite remember where he was; he smelt herbs burning, and felt the gentle sway of an _ekele_ shifting in the breeze. Sunlight lashed his eyes through the strange facsimile of glass above. He couldn't see much. He could feel the trace of Moondance in his mind, in the room around him, but not his presence.

It took him a couple of seconds to place that the person near him was Starwind. His hindbrain quailed. Starwind hadn't the nature to tend to the sick. _Maybe he does want to contain me -_

"No mage who required such containment would ask for it. It was not hard for Moondance to see that you were wounded." Starwind's voice was rough and low as the breeze outside. He dare not ask again; the matter was closed, set aside for sorrow.

Van swallowed hard. His thoughts felt brittle, as if one hard tap from Starwind might shatter them into pieces. Starwind's mind shaped no words, but he allowed Van to sense the form of his loss, a scar cut and bleeding away hopes and old confidences. It was a grief that, to Van, was more than a year upon him, and still wont to crease open at every stray twist of thought. "I'm sorry," he whispered, feeling the weight of his failures all over again.

"No," said Starwind. "All night I have asked myself, what could I have done to make her stay with me here? Had I the gift of words that my son has, could I have persuaded her to stay with us two summers ago? Death makes us such fools. It asks what we _could_ have said, should have... When I honour her I must honour her _choice_ to die as she lived - for Valdemar." He fell quiet again, and after a few slow moments of thought, Van felt him take a sharp breath. "But would that I had aided your reprisal."

Van shivered, even the thought of Leareth making him feel bruised and uneasy. His eyes cleared; Starwind was sitting on the floor near the end of Vanyel's bed, crosslegged with his bare feet poking out from under a long green robe. No sign of Asheena. It seemed clear that he was not here on a whim, and had no plans to be anywhere else.

 _:Indeed,:_ Starwind told him. _:I have needed to be with my thoughts; for that, you have been good company. Do you fear me?:_

Vanyel tried to sort through his feelings; fear was like a misty haze over everything, filling the air between them. He'd always looked up to Starwind. There were few whose approval meant more to Van, and he trusted Starwind to set his errors right. _If he's seen this twisted weapon I've become -_

_:Wingbrother, I have nothing but love for you.:_

He met Starwind's eyes, and saw strength and sanctuary held out to him like an embrace. 

_He still trusts me_ , and that thought shook him to his core. Starwind had no tolerance for dangerous mages. _I haven't trusted myself since I left Savil alone to die._ And Starwind knew. And he did not waver. _:Thank you.:_ Van tried to show the depth of his gratitude. He extended his OthersSenses, simply believing in what he saw for the first time in so long - Starwind was a green light beside him, as clear and fixed as a pole star. _:I keep failing and making mistakes. I'm terrified to use my own Gifts any more.:_

 _:You had a wound you did not understand, and neither did your Healers understand it,:_ Starwind explained. _:Moondance says you suffered a power theft.:_

 _:But that was more than a year ago,:_ he replied, perplexed and reeling from the memory - that sick feeling of Leareth touching him, taking his essence and claiming everything Vanyel had left as his own -

 _:The wound was never healed. So still you felt the trace of another - a hateful one - and did not trust the places where he had touched you. When you were in danger, and when the energy you share with your lifebonded was not what or where you expected - that is when such an unhealed wound will make itself felt. And where you were badly hurt -:_ A thought slipped to him between words, a memory of Savil, years ago, her face creased in pain and Van could only guess why. Starwind retreated from his mind with a propriety that was unusual among Tayledras. "Moondance said you had other wounds - mind wounds - and he would say no more to me, but he saw that all these things run deep together, and when you touch magic, you chance the return of much hurt and unbelonging."

That made a surprising amount of sense. "A lot of what I do with magic is reacting on instinct." And when those magical instincts felt as tainted and alien as his sexual instincts...

"Yes. For you, power moves with reflex. I have known you to defeat those equal to you in strength simply by being faster than them. But now you can't react, because you have no trust in yourself."

Everything suddenly came into focus. "I've got wary of nodes I don't know well. Leareth had set a trap on a node and he stole my power when he sensed me tapping it." _Nodes_ , of all things. He lived off them as much as he lived off wellwater, and he'd simply _accepted_ his aversion without fighting it.

"It's not good for a mage to use magic in fear. But the fear left by power theft is too dark to see from within. It consumes what it touches. There is no mage without error - I know not one. The best we can do is tread careful and repair the damage done by our mistakes. But once touched by power theft, when you err because you are startled or tired, your fear claims it as evidence that your power is still not your own. Your power remembers the darkness."

Van stared at his hands. He'd spent months thinking through smoke, seeing no more than the troubles in front of him. He remembered how much he'd come to _hope_ the Tayledras would contain him. He still didn't see how else to set things right. "I tried to attack Stef in a nightmare - I _can't_ risk that again."

"After he healed you, Moondance said to me, 'Would that I had once had such control.'" Van gasped, heart-sick. "You see? My _shay'kreth'ashke_ understands you well." Starwind's voice turned grave, and gentle. "When Savil brought him to me, he sought death, and in our work he found renewal and forgiveness, in time." He paused, and for long moments Van felt only his deep grief, a roughness in his every quiet breath. "The wounds you have suffered will take a long time to heal in full. And with Stefen, I see you do not believe you have a long time. You don't even believe you have tomorrow. What can you do to trust that you and he will have all the time that you will need?"

Vanyel closed his eyes again. It was always too easy to despair - he'd thought of so many reasons to give up Stef, so many ways he could lose him. And he almost had. Like he'd lost so many others. "What would you do, if you were me?" he dared ask.

"I am not you," Starwind replied. "But in my life I have found an alignment between what is required of me as a mage, and what is required of me as a human. To favour one or the other would make me less of both. Containment is only a solution when that alignment proves impossible. For you it would be no solution at all." 

Van felt the truth of that; at many of the lowest points of his life, magic had offered him a purpose and a route back to being part of the world. But it wasn't an answer. 

"Today, I can do little," Starwind said, and Van had never heard him sound so _tired_ before, much less old. "Tomorrow I will give honours for my wingsister, and I would have you beside me." It wasn't quite a request, and it wasn't quite his support that Starwind needed. "After, my son and I must return to the work with our valley node. I would like your assistance - we are shaping the node to draw magic from the land beyond the vale, and your strength would be of value."

"I can help," Van replied. He liked to earn his keep among his K'Treva wingsiblings, and it sounded like exactly the kind of task he'd been avoiding, and he wouldn't be working alone. He'd become so used to being the last mage, the only mage - it would be good to cast peacefully beside friends, and while Starwind would never claim it would be _safe_ , it wouldn't be combat and he wouldn't have to kill enemies or make new ones.

"Moondance said he will speak to you when he is rested." 

At that, Vanyel's heart felt like thin glass. "How's Stef?" he asked.

"He is resting below. My son says he is recovering fast - I heard them sharing songs this morning." Van breathed a deep sigh of relief. He focused on that inner sense of Stefen, and felt the familiar thrum of his beloved's life linked to his. Not yet strong, but steady and whole. "I fear Brightstar has too much sympathy for him," and he felt the warmth in Starwind's voice. "Because the singer is your _shay'kreth'ashke_ , yes, but also because he was a brave fool."

Stef wasn't usually either of those things. And that tendril of fear came back - if Leareth had first driven Stef to breathtaking courage, the taste for it had remained, and few men survived that way for long. "I can't ever repay Brightstar for healing him -"

"My son holds that it is you who are repaid. In his vanity," Starwind replied. "I confess, I haven't deterred him from thinking of himself as our brightest treasure. And he is quite satisfied with himself for conducting such a healing." Van had never known Starwind take such joy in anything else as he did in Brightstar, and for a moment that joy was bright enough to chase away the spectres that surrounded them.

Starwind raised one white eyebrow at him knowingly, and Van stretched, the light sheets slipping from his legs. _I need to see Stef._ Starwind waited patiently at as he rolled to his feet, and for a moment he felt dizzy, and he set his feet wide apart, feeling through them to place himself the way Starwind had long ago taught him, through the imperceptible movement of the wind in the branches of the heart-tree, through its roots to the earth, to where its life reached into the mage-stained lands and began their healing. A Tayledras in an ekele always knew where he was.

There was a folded robe by the bed; pulling its ties around himself, he found the dark green silk trailing below his ankles, and Starwind gave him a smile edged by hours-gone tears. This was Brightstar's home, then. That the moving of the Vale had coincided with the Speaker's son fledging wasn't coincidental. Family and magic all moved together here. He dimly remembered climbing up the king tree with Moondance what felt like days ago, his wingbrother reassuring him over and over that Stef was safe before Vanyel would accept rest and healing.

Starwind raised the hatchway and lowered himself down the steep steps cut into the limb of the ancient tree. Vanyel took three deep breaths before he followed, tasting summer on the warm wind. He reached out to Taver, not to say anything but to touch that root he had to who he was, to Valdemar, and to share what he felt in that moment. _It's been so long since I felt relieved to be alive._

 

Starwind sent him alone into the chambers cut into the Vale's bedrock at the base of the tree; light shot through the foliage above, refracting all around from bubbling spring at the centre of the underground room. He could feel life flowing all around him, flowering vines tumbling from the place above, flowers circling the great roots of the king tree, a dividing curtain shaped from a living willow. The sound and the light seemed designed to lull and soothe; with his lingering pain, Van could have merrily tumbled face first into the water.

He sensed the presences nearby. The willowy curtain barred the way to the chamber where Moondance slept, and Van trod careful as he passed. Moondance had never relinquished his habit of living on the earth; after the years he'd spent sleeping above when Brightstar was a young child, Van suspected it was his personal affectation at this point, a willful refusal to fully assimilate. Moondance rarely spoke of his past but sometimes Van could sense him holding it in his bones, in his words. Though considering how often Tayledras scouts came home wounded, Van supposed many Tayledras healers maintained some comfortable space that wasn't halfway up a tree.

Another shade was half thrown back over a hollow, letting light into the chamber beyond. Van stepped slowly around the edge of the pool til he could see inside. Stef sat beneath a woven bed-canopy, wrapped in one of the feather-stuffed blankets that Van had only seen the Tayledras use in the dead of winter. He looked lost in its folds - a hollow face, a sharp collarbone, framed between bright blossoms and three-pointed leaves. Van froze, his heart tangled in recrimination. If he would have promised Stef any one thing, it would have been that he'd never, ever know hunger again. That he'd live well all the rest of his days, with or without Van beside him.

_But I never have promised him anything._

Stef's bright eyes caught Vanyel's. Van came close and reached for his lover's hands, feeling his warmth, his strength, that deep music that he had been so afraid he would never know again.

"I _can_ feel you," Stef observed, his hand quivering over Vanyel's. Van nodded, daring himself to keep his shields relaxed, and Stef's fear and fatigue and fluttering frustration roiled through the touch of their hands, and under it all, Stef was _trying_ , again, his fire bringing everything together. "I was worried, after the Gate - you were like you weren't there - and when I asked Brightstar he always said you were there-above. Above what?" Stef shook his head in perplexity.

"I'll ask Starwind if I can show you later," he said. "I had to rest."

Stef rubbed at the heels of Van's thumbs with his dry fingertips. "Are you alright now?"

"No," and the admission shattered some wall inside him. _No, I am not alright. I haven't been alright since it happened - I lost something, something I never knew I had and I don't know how to live or breathe without. I don't know how to be the person I used to be, the person you somehow fell in love with, and the further I go from you the further I am from myself and I don't know the way back._

He shook the dust of that collapse from his eyes, and saw Stef on the other side, as if he had always been there, waiting for Van to see him again. "Neither am I." His eyes were stormy green and utterly vulnerable, hiding nothing. Stef lifted the edge of the blanket, and opened his arms.

Van fell into his embrace and clutched Stef as hard as he dared, warming his whole self around that bright flame, feeling his beloved shake with that terror of having almost lost everything, while Van felt bitter tears sting his eyes for all the loves he had lost.

"I w - wasn't sure - til you touched me, I h - honestly thought I was dead. Or dreaming and dying. This is..." Stef trailed off, and his pointed finger wavered around, capturing the silk-spun bedcurtains and the sunken pool and the roots of the heart-tree beyond. Van caught it and held it tight.

"I know," he murmured. He had once found k'Treva Vale hard to take in, too. And he'd had Moondance to help, who at least remembered well enough what it was like to be a newcomer who found everything strange.

"Brightstar w - wouldn't let me go see you - said I needed to get stronger to climb up there - I thought," and he shook his head as if trying to dislodge a metaphor. "The one moment I really believed it was last night when he caught me stumbling around trying to find a chamber pot. I still d - don't know where the kitchen is," Stef stuttered. "There's always been something to eat when I wake up. I've not got track of time. Keep falling asleep, and I saw the edge of the moon, and then sunlight... I just wanted you. Brightstar's usually here. I don't know where he's gone. We've sung and t - talked a lot. He has the Bardic Gift, you know?" Van nodded, relieved to feel such music in Stef's voice again, even in his jumbles and quavers. "So what's wrong, Van- _ashke_?"

Vanyel sighed, and leaned his head against his lover's. _'Nothing now,'_ he wanted to say, but Stef didn't need an empty wish, he needed honesty. "Starwind says there was still a wound in my magical reserves from when Leareth stole power from me. I should have known. I've been having bad memories since I left Haven, and whenever I used magic, something seemed to go wrong and I couldn't stop thinking about it or feeling like..." Van closed his eyes against Stef's implacable kindness. Put into words, it all seemed so banal, not like a nest of black snakes eating up his mind. "Moondance healed the wound but - I don't know when I'll feel like I used to. What if it's never?" He was grimly picturing years - or decades - of this erratic barrage of nightmares, atop the ones he'd already had, and he didn't know if he could endure it. He knew Stef deserved better than to live alongside that.

Stef stroked gently at the line where his hair met his forehead. "You're mourning it. Let yourself," he suggested gently. "You keep fighting to be somewhere else. But you're here, and so am I, and we're together again."

"I can't ask you to - to take care of me -"

"You don't have to. Do I have to?" Stef didn't even call him a fool, or flash with tightly leashed anger. He was tired and shaken, and truly asking nothing but to rest in his beloved's presence, and Van could only hold him and silently swear that he'd _try_ to become whole again, without hiding or pretending.

Eventually, Stef nudged him, with some reluctance. "Brightstar's going to come back and find us like this sooner or later."

"I don't mind that if you don't," Van told him, and he Felt Stef's surprise, and it gave him a little stab of guilt. Stef had tried to match Van's limits when it came to who witnessed their affection, even when he thought it needless. _I've worried and politicked him around over so many petty fools._

"Of course I don't mind," Stef replied. "Just wasn't sure if you would. I had noticed his fathers aren't so...subtle as us."

"Different taboos," Van replied. "Brightstar would be more affronted if we tried to hide it around him. Tayledras never admit to finding anything people do together strange." Indeed, Van remembered how _angry_ Brightstar had been when Van told him that to be a gift-child was a taboo in Valdemar, as was any family arrangement outside the most common array of a mother married to a father. He'd been mollified when Van had explained the hypocrisy of this prejudice - Brightstar grudgingly agreed to compare it to the way Tayledras insist that outsiders are uncivilised and best avoided or killed, all the while hailing their Valdemaran friends.

Stef looked up at him with a sudden, intense curiosity. "Have you ever felt jealous of them? Starwind and Moondance, I mean."

The question discomfited him, but he wouldn't lie to Stef now. "Yes. Of course. I first met them right after Tylendel died." Stef's hand tightened on his forearm. "What made you ask?" Stef held his silence, his head resting on Vanyel's shoulder. A breeze stirred the curtain above them. The length of Stef's silence was answer enough. "Are _you_ jealous of them?"

"Very," Stef admitted. "I can't look at them without thinking about how I'm going to go home with you and be discreet and inoffensive again. They act like no one would whisper or laugh about them. They have a _son_ and no one questions it. It's so normal, they might as well be married!"

Stef sounded more mystified than resentful. Van squeezed him gently. "I know. I've always wondered how much easier it could have been if I'd seen people like them in Valdemar." He'd been angry about it, then despairing, but he'd nothing left but resigned thoughts of what might have been if he and 'Lendel had never had to hide or feel ashamed of what they were. He sensed Stef flicker through similar feelings, if less bittersweet - just the strangeness of coming to realise that what he'd accepted as the way of things was anything but. And on that note - "You're wrong in one respect, though."

"Oh?"

"They _are_ married. The Tayledras custom is very different," he added, as Stef gaped at him. "I told you that Tayledras trade bondbird feathers as a sign they intend to stay together for the long term? That's the only marriage rite they have. It's not overseen by a priest or a magistrate - it's usually performed in private and they say the world itself serves as witness. They speak a few traditional words, and then they display each other's feather and the rest of the clan simply _recognises_ the relationship."

Stef's brow creased in bewilderment. "What words?"

A knifeblade shiver ran through him.

He should have expected it. Was this how he would end, his heart stopped by his beloved's inevitable curiosity? Vanyel moved above him and cradled Stef's face in his hands as he spoke, in Tayledras first because even without Stef's comprehending, he barely dared speak the vow Moondance had once taught him of. Stef didn't reply - how could he? - so he forced it into Valdemaran, feeling clumsy for even trying. "Stefen, would you wear my feather for all the world and skies to see?"

Light danced above them in near silence. Stef reached his thin arms around Vanyel and pulled him down tight against him. "Yes, but of course yes," he answered, so close their lips brushed. 

For the first time since autumn Van was fully open to their mingled feelings; love, shock, fear and joy and determination and desperate exhaustion. A reassurance he'd never expected. _We needed those words, more than I would have ever known._

"I don't have a bondbird," he said eventually, feeling foolish.

"Does it matter?" Stef asked. "Does it - not count if we don't -"

He smiled. "I'm not worried about that. We could do something that makes more sense for us. Rings, or somesuch. If you want it."

"Gods," replied Stefen, dazed. "So everyone recognises it, you say? Do we tell people?"

"Who do you want to tell?" he sighed, knowing Stef all too well.

Stef's smile turned shy. "Well, Medren. And Jisa, obviously."

"Obviously." Jisa would be tickled pink that _he'd_ gone and married in private.

"Breda, if you'd not mind."

"She'll be relieved that I made an honest man of you." 

Stef laughed weakly. "Relieved and sceptical. Gods and wild dreams, I never knew..." 

"Neither did I." Van stroked Stef's hair gently away from his face. He understood; when Moondance told him of that vow all those years ago, his very first thought was that he would never, ever speak those words to anyone. He'd been _certain_ he never could. _'Lendel and I didn't dare let_ anyone _see us, and I was sure there'd not be anyone else for me... That's what I had accepted._ "I didn't know I'd have you," he said simply. He never knew he could feel so raw and wounded yet so content at the same time. "Much less that you'd stay even after everything went so wrong."

"Fool," Stef muttered.

"Then I'll count you a fool for holding on." How many times had he decided it would be easier to give Stef up? _I'll never think that again, not after coming so close to losing him. I can't give up on healing now. I owe us that._

"When we get back to Haven, I'm going to commandeer one of those empty suites with two or three bedrooms," he declared.

Stef nodded. "I'd like that. I want to be near you, and if you sometimes need to be alone - honestly, I'd be happy with a study with a corner I can curl up and sleep in. I'm not so long out of apprentice quarters. I'm not so long out of _slums_ \- really, you know I'll come anywhere so long as you were there too."

It took Van long moments to voice his reply, feeling like he was cutting coldly through all their joy. "Stef - I might be assigned to Haven, but if everything stays this volatile I'm not always going to be able to stay with you -"

"I _know_ that! I'm used to that." Stef scowled. "Just - promise me, this is all I want - _promise_ me you won't shut me out or run away from me if I _could_ help. If being married to you means anything, I think it has to mean that."

Van nodded slowly. "You're right." _I thought I was sparing you from the worst of me - but that was never fair to you, was it? You aren't marrying half of me. I pledged you all of me._ "I promise." 

Stef leaned up and kissed him again, fiercely, fit to melt him and seal the bargain there on his lips. "Good," he whispered, "Because if I ever lose you to this damned war, I want to know we shared everything we could."

The thought wrenched at his heart and his memories, but somehow Van found a smile. "I had Tran offer to Karse that I wouldn't go back to the border or cast magic there again."

Stef blinked at him thrice, slowly, confused then relieved then calculating. "I can see how that would make a useful negotiation play -"

"It took seeing the Shadow-Lover's hands on you to make me think of it." Stef stared back at him in shock. "I know you would never have asked it of me. You know me too well for that. But I've duties more complicated than combat magic - duties to Taver, to Jisa and Treven, and to you. And honestly, to myself as well. Coming so close to being alone again almost broke me. I - I couldn't think of - of going on without you. I can't make _you_ promise to hide your life away in Haven - but I've never been so afraid of anything."

Determination glinted in Stef's eyes like flecks of green glass, softening in the kaleidoscope turn of his expression. "Look, I'm not going to pretend I regret it. But I've had time to think about it. I know it was a mistake - maybe one I had to make. I missed you and I wanted to do some work that mattered. Then once we got trapped in the citadel...I did what I had to. I couldn't stop - I got to know everyone, know what they needed to feel. I remembered who I used to be when I was hungry..." Stef shook his head. "I knew what to do. How to survive. Everything narrowed to, to that. Does that make sense?"

Too much. Van pulled him tight against him, as if holding one safe moment was all that he dared ask for. _I think I deserved for you to do - something._

"And the moment you walked into Percever's gatehouse, I was more glad that Horn had survived than I was to be alive. I'd been so afraid that my strength would run out before anyone could stop the Karsites taking the city and then no one would ever hear what had happened. And maybe my being there made a difference, just in one little city for a couple of months, but it wasn't really _about_ me at all - I was only doing what I had to, sharing ideas, things that came into me from, from where I've been and the times I was hungry before and from _you_ and I knew it was enough to hold the world together, even if I was outside of it looking in. I couldn't stand the thought of that being snuffed out of the world - I'd have rather died than lose it. I know I'm not making sense. I would have written it down, but," he shrugged. "Burned all my paper after the birch kindling ran out. But if I could put it into words and music - it would go much further and faster than I could alone. I don't have to _be_ there every time a city needs that. I can't be."

"You are making sense," Van told him. He could latch on to that last part, at least.

Stef raised an eyebrow, clearly disbelieving. "Well, when I was so terrified I'd die without making anyone understand what happened there, that's a good sign I need to write about it, surely." He paused. "And that I'd never see you again. I was terrified of that too. And dying. I was afraid of nearly everything, those last two weeks. If it's any comfort, I doubt I'll ever be bored again in my life."

"Yes you will," Van sighed. He wanted to believe Stef - it would be a relief - but Tran had been right; even if Stef himself thought that was the end of it, that wasn't so likely. "I won't tell you how to live. But I keep wondering what I would have done differently if I'd _known_ you were in danger. I _didn't_ know, and my mind was - it wasn't where it should have been."

"Van- _ashke_?" Van felt that compelling softness in him, and he wanted to submit to that healing instinct, to not even reply, just _feel_ until he was safe again - but it wouldn't be right. A marriage might not survive silence, and this was something his - _great gods_ \- husband deserved to know.

"Ever since I left Rethwallen, when I thought about you everything felt wrong - which makes sense _now_ \- but I took to dwelling on Tylendel. It was - comforting," he admitted. "I even - when I used FarSight to survey Horn Citadel, I thought I saw _'Lendel_ talking to Percey." Stef's hand fell still against his arm, and his face turned thoughtful in a way that Van couldn't read. "I'd been thinking about him obsessively, and that crossed into my FarSight, somehow."

"I guess that's not surprising," Stef said.

His voice was flat, and Van didn't dare peer too closely at his feelings. Stef waited patiently as Van searched for the words to admit this. " _Ashke_ \- I'm not usually so fixated - but I do think of him. Wherever I am, no matter what I've been doing, I still think of Tylendel every day."

"Good," Stef said, with feeling. "I'm glad you do. I trust you'd think of me, if I'd..." Van slipped his shaking fingers over Stef's lips, unable to bear the thought right now. Stef kissed them impudently. "Well, I know I'd think of you all my life. So I'm glad for him to stay in your thoughts."

It was a relief to have finally talked about it - he'd never known how to tell Stef what role 'Lendel still had in his life. He'd never before realised that Stef might want to know. "I always think of him when I fall asleep - even beside you. And when I wake up. Sometimes in between - even a dozen times in between. Happy thoughts, if I can find them. I've wondered so many times what he'd think of you." With trembling fingers he brushed Stef's hair back behind his ears, and he had to wonder all over again. _He would have liked you, but never understood you_ , Van decided. "It wasn't like this. I didn't have anything else in my life back then. He was my everything. I couldn't see when he was going wrong." Stef's lips parted, but he said nothing. Of course he knew, everyone knew, what Tylendel had done. What his rage and power had led to. And it twisted inside him to know that was _all_ Stef could really know of a man who'd been so, so much more. "I'll always love him," and he couldn't explain that burning-bright feeling of being together when the rest of the world was against them - too bright, blinding and destroying.

But he didn't have to. Dry fingertips touched his tears, and he felt Stef's tender understanding enveloping him. "I want you to tell me about him sometime," and that insistence only surprised him because Stef had never been so bold before. 

"I will," he promised. "Sometime. But I have a favour I'd beg you in return." He lay back into Stef's pillows, and Stef looked down at him, sharp curiosity in his eyes. "When you write that epic about what happened at Horn, I need you to make Herald Torrall the hero."

"Torrall? Oh gods," Stef muttered. "Yes. I can see why. With what you're always saying about Heralds and Herald-Mages - yes. Torrall," he repeated thoughtfully.

"He hinted that he knew you," Van added, looking up into Stef's flushed face. "So what did you do to him?"

"That's a story." Van stared patiently. "Have you ever played a game of Swift Marauders?"

"Gods. Not since before I got my Whites, and I never really understood the rules."

"There aren't any. But Torrall didn't know that."

_"What did you do to him?"_

~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Gildaurel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gildaurel/works) wrote a really sweet followup to this ending, which you can find [here](https://last-herald-mage.dreamwidth.org/25703.html).


End file.
